These "leaks" are annoying. They just give you a page with virtually no information, just a chart showing some connection. Release everything. Don't insult my intelligence by deciding for me what to release.
I partially agree with the parent. Showing these "connections" without any context and detail is just infuriating and leads to click-bait headlines with no actual purpose served.
I don't think they are trying to insult anyone's intelligence though. They are just being careful with the data so that their sources are safe.
While safety is important, this reminds me of the story of the boy who cried wolf. If they keep doing this multiple times and there is no substantial info., people will stop paying attention when there is some real info. and demagogues will use this as evidence of fake news.
The problem is that incorporation documents are frequently only a small part of the story. It does allow you to correlate ownership, but unless you can actually show some kind of money movement into and out of accounts, it is difficult to show evidence of a particular crime.
Looked at one randomly, looks like some University fund is a shareholder (with over 200 other funds) of a Warburg Pincus fund (a private equity company).
I'm not exactly sure how that's a big deal, nothing there implies they avoid taxes or anything. (Maybe the fund they invest in does shady things, but it doesn't look like they have any kind of weird offshore setup)
Do you mean evade or avoid? Everyone avoids tax. Currently taxes on property transfers in the UK are 5% on property priced at £925,000 and 10% if priced at £925,001. I guess Joe Nonavoider sets the price at the latter figure?
Most of these offshore tax shelters are not illegal. It's just shady that wealthy individuals and organizations can stash their millions and billions away from public scrutiny and avoid paying taxes on them.
It's particularly egregious in the case of ostensibly not-for-profit educational institutions.
Yes and no. These arrangements are often grounds for prosecution once they come to light. Just because moving money from A to B and from B to C is legal, it doesn't mean that going from A to C is still legal.
Tax authorities usually struggle to reconstruct the entire chain, so they don't prosecute... until somebody else does the job for them, and then they piggyback.
They're not really deciding for you what to release, since you have nothing to release.
Is your concern that their interpretation of the source material is inaccurate, or that you're being intentionally misled or occluded?
The ICIJ has been around for two decades, and their credibility is robust.
I don't think they're likely to be making claims like this without access to substantial evidence.
It’s not that I distrust them, it’s just that I’m a lawyer, operations, and finance guy. The source documents would be extremely interesting to me. Instead I get a meaningless graph that tells me almost nothing. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in personal experiences with journalists is that they’re just that, journalists. They don’t have expertise in finance, law, or most anything complex. Let the data be open sourced and mined by actual experts.
93 media agencies working together to analyse some 13 million documents ... and you don't think they've employed one or two lawyers with domain expertise to assist?
While the documents may be interesting to you and others, they're not yours to disseminate. If the graph is meaningless to you, then you should ignore it.
I note that the Australian Tax Office published a press release [1] earlier this month around the Paradise Papers. Presumably other nation state revenue collection agencies have released similar, or at least have comparable expectations from this latest set of papers.
Reading between the lines, there's an expectation that a release of the entire set of source papers may reduce the efficacy of their efforts to recover these lost revenues. I concede that I may be optimistic in my interpretation and expectations here.
A journalist without domain expertise or the support of a domain expert without an agenda related to the subject-matter of the reporting is crippled in the same way a programmer without domain expertise or support of a domain expert is; journalism may, itself, be a complex domain (as programming is), but expertise in it does not provide relevant domain expertise in the domain that is the subject of reporting.
And it's absolutely the case that most journalists covering complex domains don't have an educational background in the domain, and in most domains the market doesn't really reward development of domain expertise (in political reporting, there's some pressure driving reporters to develop some expertise in electoral politics, but that's kind of exceptional, and isn't reflected in other domains, even the policy end of political reporting.)
The GGP made claims about these journalists in particular; I don't see anything to back up those claims.
Also, I know people like to criticize journalists (despite having no domain expertise in journalism), but let's raise our standards to making well-supported, informative statements:
> A journalist without domain expertise or the support of a domain expert without an agenda related to the subject-matter of the reporting is crippled ...
A developer who is illiterate also is limited, but that isn't meaningful. It tells us nothing about any particular developer or about the population of developers.
> it's absolutely the case that most journalists covering complex domains don't have an educational background in the domain
That's a very broad statement, about every journalist who covers every "complex" domain. How many have backgrounds in what domains?
And it implies that lacking educational background means they don't understand the field they cover. Certainly that's not true. Many people I know lack an educational background in their professions; many Silicon Valley legends have no educational background. Some lawyers run large companies, including financial companies, despite lacking MBAs or any financial education. As I wrote in another HN post, Herbert Simon won a Nobel Prize in Economics, won a Turing Award, wrote the book on industrial organization, was a leader in cognitive psychology, and his educational background was political science.
A journalist who has covered finance for decades certainly has domain expertise.
I think part of the reason they do this is because there's massive amounts of unorganized data. This would make it both difficult for individuals to analyze, and would also pose a privacy risk to people and organizations.
If transparency is good, then these reporters should be more transparent with the information they have. That's not too much to ask. Doling it out like this isn't very helpful.
I don't think they are trying to insult anyone's intelligence though. They are just being careful with the data so that their sources are safe.
While safety is important, this reminds me of the story of the boy who cried wolf. If they keep doing this multiple times and there is no substantial info., people will stop paying attention when there is some real info. and demagogues will use this as evidence of fake news.