The first tantalizing tidbits from a year-long investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the Sueddeutsche Zeitung and more than 100 other media organizations, including CommonWealth Magazine, into a massive trove of leaked files from a Panamanian law firm were released on Sunday, shining a spotlight on the secretive world of offshore financial holdings.
The cache of 11.5 million files dating from 1977 through last year has been dubbed the “Panama Papers,” and represents a treasure chest far more significant than WikiLeaks, former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations about global surveillance, or the HSBC files last year.
More than 16,000 Taiwanese investors are among the list of people in more than 200 nations and territories whose 214,000 offshore shell companies are mentioned in the files of law firm Mossack Fonseca.
More information is to come in the days and weeks ahead, although the ICIJ said it would not release the full list of companies and people linked to the Panama Papers until early next month.
What is known now is that 143 politicians, including 12 current or former heads of state, their relatives and close associates apparently used Mossack Fonseca’s services to help shield vast wealth. It is also clear that several prominent businesspeople and celebrities are likely to have a lot of explaining to do.
The Kremlin said that the details leaked about alleged connections to Russian President Vladimir Putin provide no new information. China is likely to block any leaks about the financial dealings of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) relatives the way it did a Bloomberg News expose in 2012.
While other public figures named have also denied any wrongdoing, several governments on Monday said they would be investigating potential wrongdoing, including money laundering, drug trafficking, sanctions busting and tax evasion.
While sheltering assets in offshore tax havens is not illegal in a lot of nations, the very rich — just like many global corporations — have access to options that the average taxpayer or small business owner does not, and there has been growing evidence over the past few years that national treasuries the world over are losing out as a result — as is the global economy.
It is clear that governments, individually and collectively, will have to work much harder to ensure that reforms to the international financial system enacted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis are enforced and transparency becomes the rule, not the exception.
This is a Herculean task, as authorities in nations big and small are often hampered by a lack of resources to track financial information and investigate investor identities, something CommonWeath recently highlighted with a cover story on the spread of “red wealth” in Taiwan.
The magazine’s report said that despite all the national security ramifications involved in Chinese capital being invested in Taiwan, the monitoring systems in place barely scrape the surface, especially when Chinese investors use proxies and third-nation shell companies to invest in Taiwan. Chinese investors have made inroads in a multitude of Taiwanese businesses and projects, including wastewater treatment plants, well-known brands and property development in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投), it said.
The abuse of laws regulating shell companies and offshore tax havens has become a cancer eating away at the global finance economy and threatening the national security of many nations, not just Taiwan.
The ICIJ, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, CommonWealth, other media outlets and the more than 370 journalists in nearly 80 nations, including three from Taiwan, who have been involved in the probe into the Panama Papers are owed a huge thanks for their efforts. We eagerly await the next installments.
Chinese agents often target Taiwanese officials who are motivated by financial gain rather than ideology, while people who are found guilty of spying face lenient punishments in Taiwan, a researcher said on Tuesday. While the law says that foreign agents can be sentenced to death, people who are convicted of spying for Beijing often serve less than nine months in prison because Taiwan does not formally recognize China as a foreign nation, Institute for National Defense and Security Research fellow Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said. Many officials and military personnel sell information to China believing it to be of little value, unaware that
Before 1945, the most widely spoken language in Taiwan was Tai-gi (also known as Taiwanese, Taiwanese Hokkien or Hoklo). However, due to almost a century of language repression policies, many Taiwanese believe that Tai-gi is at risk of disappearing. To understand this crisis, I interviewed academics and activists about Taiwan’s history of language repression, the major challenges of revitalizing Tai-gi and their policy recommendations. Although Taiwanese were pressured to speak Japanese when Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, most managed to keep their heritage languages alive in their homes. However, starting in 1949, when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) enacted martial law
“Si ambulat loquitur tetrissitatque sicut anas, anas est” is, in customary international law, the three-part test of anatine ambulation, articulation and tetrissitation. And it is essential to Taiwan’s existence. Apocryphally, it can be traced as far back as Suetonius (蘇埃托尼烏斯) in late first-century Rome. Alas, Suetonius was only talking about ducks (anas). But this self-evident principle was codified as a four-part test at the Montevideo Convention in 1934, to which the United States is a party. Article One: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) government;
The central bank and the US Department of the Treasury on Friday issued a joint statement that both sides agreed to avoid currency manipulation and the use of exchange rates to gain a competitive advantage, and would only intervene in foreign-exchange markets to combat excess volatility and disorderly movements. The central bank also agreed to disclose its foreign-exchange intervention amounts quarterly rather than every six months, starting from next month. It emphasized that the joint statement is unrelated to tariff negotiations between Taipei and Washington, and that the US never requested the appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar during the
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