The Panama Papers
Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money
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3.6 • 10 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
From the winners of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting
11.5 million documents sent through encrypted channels. The secret records of 214,000 offshore companies. The largest data leak in history.
In early 2015, an anonymous whistle-blower led investigative journalists Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier into the shadow economy where the super-rich hide billions of dollars in complex financial networks. Thus began the ground-breaking investigation that saw an international team of 400 journalists work in secret for a year to uncover cases involving heads of state, politicians, businessmen, big banks, the mafia, diamond miners, art dealers and celebrities. A real-life thriller, The Panama Papers is the gripping account of how the story of the century was exposed to the world.
Customer Reviews
The Panama Papers
Disappointing to say the least. It is chocked full of technical computer stuff and descriptions of legal documents and financial statements which might be of interest to a lawyer or an accountant. I am neither so I felt like I wasted my money.
Loses credibility with plenty of bias
The book has interesting points and can be entertaining at times, but loses credibility with clear bias and double standards.
The bias is obvious at points and there are some factual errors of omission that we noticed so one wonders what else the authors are hiding or misrepresenting.
They claim to want uniform rules and laws for everyone but in reality they support unequal laws and are supporting the authoritarians who want power, perhaps unknowingly.
For example, they state people "were conned" into taking out large mortgages. Anyone who believes that people didn't have free will to do or not do so is delusional. They want rules to apply equally and then advocate for different rules for different people.
The authors fail to differentiate between corrupt government leaders, and leaders in organizations and private individuals. That is a huge factor: when the government is involved in everything, everything becomes a political fight to the death to have one group steal assets from another.
Freedom is the answer, not control as the authors seem to advocate. Anyone who thinks that giving people liberty is a "race to the bottom" has their priorities reversed, or nefarious goals to control others.
Throwing corrupt authoritarians and their supporters in large companies in the same boat as others does a disservice to everyone and shows their bias.
Countries should compete to be freest, not compete to be most controlling.