Five years later, how the Panama Papers pushed the U.S. to stop being a ‘haven’ for crooks – By Kevin G. Hall, Nicholas Nehamas (Miami Herald) / April 3 2021
In the five years since publication of the Panama Papers on this day in 2016, the U.S. government and some U.S. states have taken significant steps to make money laundering and tax evasion more difficult.
Most notable was the Corporate Transparency Act, which became federal law earlier this year, and got over the finish line with a surprising push from Delaware and other states that backed bolstering the Treasury Department’s ability to fight dirty money.
The stories that came out of the leak of secret offshore documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, part of a global reporting collaboration led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, spotlighted how dirty money flooded into Miami real estate, aided drug traffickers and how Latin American kleptocrats, accused and in some cases convicted, stealthily moved their wealth.
Published by the Miami Herald and its parent McClatchy, the Panama Papers exposed the role of middlemen, showing how the United States was in some ways similar to the British Virgin Islands, Panama or the faraway Seychelles islands when it came to offering corporate secrecy for sale.
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