The United States of Dirty Money
Over the weekend, a consortium of journalists dropped the latest jaw-dropper of an investigation into the sordid, metastasizing world of offshore finance. Dubbed the “Pandora Papers”—following 2016’s Panama Papers and 2017’s Paradise Papers—the documents revealed a litany of now-familiar offshore-banking and tax-sheltering shenanigans, including the Jordanian king’s nine-figure real-estate purchases, the Azerbaijani dictator’s British investments, and the spiderweb of finance linked to the Kremlin, all built on illicit or ill-gotten gains and roped behind networks of financial opacity.
The Pandora Papers are the biggest batch of revelations to date, including details from nearly 12 million corporate and financial records. In addition to its unprecedented scope, this. once meant far-flung islands beyond the reach of major economies, but the U.S. has brought those same services back onshore—and, in so doing, evolved into one of the world’s greatest havens for financial secrecy.
