'Panama Papers' Group Strikes Again with 'Paradise Papers' (theguardian.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader Freshly Exhumed tipped us off to a new document leak that's just revealed massive tax havens used by the world's most wealthy and powerful people. An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian: The material, which has come from two offshore service providers and the company registries of 19 tax havens, was obtained by the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with partners including the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times. The project has been called the Paradise Papers.
It's the same group responsible for the Panama Papers, and the Guardian reports that in these 13.4 million new files, journalists have discovered:

• "How Twitter and Facebook received hundreds of millions of dollars in investments that can be traced back to Russian state financial institutions."

• "Aggressive tax avoidance by multinational corporations, including Nike and Apple."

• "Extensive offshore dealings by Donald Trump's cabinet members, advisers and donors, including substantial payments from a firm co-owned by Vladimir Putin's son-in-law to the shipping group of the US commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross."

• "The tax-avoiding Cayman Islands trust managed by the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau's chief moneyman."

"The publication of this investigation, for which more than 380 journalists have spent a year combing through data that stretches back 70 years, comes at a time of growing global income inequality," reports the Guardian. "Meanwhile, multinational companies are shifting a growing share of profits offshore -- €600 billion in the last year alone -- the leading economist Gabriel Zucman will reveal in a study to be published later this week. "Tax havens are one of the key engines of the rise in global inequality," he said."

Comments

"Aggressive tax avoidance "?

[jcr]

Since when is it "aggression" to keep what you earn?

Every dollar kept out of government hands is a dollar not spent on causing bloody mayhem. As an Apple shareholder, I wish they'd get a lot MORE proactive about saving my money and zero out their tax payments the way that GE does.

-jcr