Ironically no United States billionaire is named in the papers though the latest count shows that there are 3 204 billionaires in the world, 927 of them from the United States.
Sam Pizzigati, writing for Inequality.org, said this was probably because US billionaires have no reason to hide their fortunes since they pay very little taxes.
Another reason, he said, was that: “The relative absence of US billionaires in the Pandora Papers has nothing whatsoever to do with nobility. We’re talking accessibility here. The US super rich have plenty of financial agents — the tax attorneys, accountants, and wealth managers, as my Institute for Policy Studies colleague Chuck Collins puts it, ‘paid millions to help billionaires sequester trillions’ — close to home. They don’t need to partake of the services provided by wealth advisory firms in places like Samoa, Cyprus, and Singapore, or any of the other 11 offshore locales from where the Pandora Papers leaked.”
South Dakota is now reported to be the best tax haven in the world.
But Norton and another US journalist Max Blumenthal have a different view. They argue that US billionaires are not named in the Pandora papers because they fund the organisations running the stories including the ICIJ.
Though ICIJ has several funders, they single out Luminate which is financed by billionaire Pierre Omidyar of eBay, and Open Society funded by the better known George Soros. The two billionaires, the two journalists claim, work with United States intelligence and fund media organisations across the globe that promote regime change under the guise of advocating for democracy.
The first story on Tagwirei this year, for example, was published by the Daily Maverick in South Africa in February and was entitled: Report on cartel power dynamics in Zimbabwe.
The Maverick said this was an explosive cartel report that uncovered the anatomy of a captured state. It was an exclusive report which provided a post mortem of the cancer that killed the Zimbabwean dream of freedom and independence. The Maverick claimed that the report was being published in South Africa because it was not safe to do so in Zimbabwe because of attacks on the media and activists in Zimbabwe.
“The 64-page report details the scale of the theft – among others, illicit cross-border financial transactions cost Zimbabwe up to a staggering US$3-billion a year and billions in gold and diamonds smuggled out of the country. It is estimated that Zimbabwe may lose up to half the value of its annual GDP of US$21.4bn due to corrupt economic activity that, even if not directly the work of the cartels featured in the report, is the result of their suffocation of honest economic activity through collusion, price fixing and monopolies,” the Maverick said.
“Ironically, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who has been a public critic of illicit financial transfers, is identified by the report as one of the cartel bosses whose patronage and protection keeps cartels operating,” it went on.
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