The Pandora Papers and Spain (First Part)

 The Pandora Papers is a giant hack of information – around twelve million archives – about offshore accounts and the wealthy people who hold them. Those who could be said to be most responsible for contributing towards the improvement of our lives by paying their share in taxes, and failing to do so. Some of the accounts revealed by the leak had previously been closed for one reason or another, but many others remain open.

We read of three current presidents and eleven past presidents from Latin America. We read of some world leaders – such as the Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis and the King of Jordan, together with former associates of both Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and Russian President Vladimir Putin…

We also read about other (more) popular figures with offshore tax-avoiding schemes: Pep Guardiola, Julio Iglesias, Shakira, Elton John, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Claudia Schiffer… and even Tony Blair (Gosh!).

Sometimes even saints are sinners, as we learn that Los Legionarios de Cristo also have (or at least had) a nice little nest egg of 295 million euros quietly stashed offshore.

The investigation comes from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists which says in its feature titled ‘Offshore havens and hidden riches of world leaders and billionaires exposed in an unprecedented leak’ that ‘The Pandora Papers reveal the inner workings of a shadow economy that benefits the wealthy and well-connected at the expense of everyone else’, and, between one thing and another, that some US$11,300,000,000 are hidden under a rock (equivalent to nine times the GDP of Spain, for example). 

“The new data leak must be a wake-up call,” said Sven Giegold, a Green party lawmaker in the European Parliament. “Global tax evasion fuels global inequality. We need to expand and sharpen the countermeasures now.”

In Spain, the primary information is being handled by El País and LaSexta.  Thus, we read about Corinna Larsen, Miguel Bosé, Pep Guardiola, Julio Iglesias (more on him here) and, in El País, we look forward to reading more about ‘the opaque business of 600 Spaniards and some 750 offshore companies linked to Spanish interests’.

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Not that things end there. In Spain, the 216 companies that invoice more than 1,000 million euros a year pay (in practice, not in theory) a 5.47% tax on their profit. This is up to four times less than the usual tax paid by the ordinary small and medium-sized companies’.