Sactioning Panama would work like shit, because what you'd have to do to is ask of Panama something in return for lifting the sanctions, which only implies, can you please remake your tax codes so that you aren't a tax haven anymore, which would end in tax raises up the butt for the general populace, which is a dick move to a country with barely any agricultural or industrial sector to speak of.
Tax code? Nah. Banking laws, on the other hand, and banking transparency laws, might have a better effect. In other words, making it impossible for any country's banks to hide money from another country.
(Of course, this idea is much easier said than done, and even harder to enforce.)
edited 5th Apr '16 12:02:58 AM by Ramidel
Part of me is just imagining the editor in chief of the SZ calling all the other German newspapers right now, laugh ten seconds into the phone and move to the next.
Also, according to news sites, Icelands PM has called for a new election.
edited 5th Apr '16 6:51:08 AM by 3of4
"You can reply to this Message!"Also, note that contrary to public perception, the US is one of the biggest havens in the world. It's easier to register a shell company in Nevada or Delaware than almost anywhere else.
Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's PlayThere's also the possibility that Panama is too close to the US; if you were going to stash your ill-gotten gains somewhere and you were from the US, your natural choices would be countries without an extradition treaty.
All are possibilities, though, and most news sources favor the "US as tax haven" theory. Delaware, Wyoming, and Nevada have all come in for special mention, as states where LLC incorporation laws were the loosest.
Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.France puts Panama back on list of countries that don't cooperate in catching tax evaders.
edited 5th Apr '16 8:19:57 PM by Demonic_Braeburn
Any group who acts like morons ironically will eventually find itself swamped by morons who think themselves to be in good company.

If there’s some Moore’s Law of Leaks, however, it seems to be exponential. Just five years have passed since WikiLeaks’ Cablegate coup, and now the world is grappling with a whistleblower megaleak on a scale never seen before: 2.6 terabytes, well over a thousandfold larger.
On Sunday, more than a hundred media outlets around the world, coordinated by the Washington, DC-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, released stories on the Panama Papers, a gargantuan collection of leaked documents exposing a widespread system of global tax evasion. The leak includes more than 4.8 million emails, 3 million database files, and 2.1 million PDFs from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca that, according to analysis of the leaked documents, appears to specialize in creating shell companies that its clients have used to hide their assets.
Introduction from Wired (warning: does not play well with adblockers or scriptblockers)
; the Guardian's intro is here,
Fusion, here.
The home site of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which is handling the whole thing, is here.
As of this writing, the revelations have thus far implicated well over a hundred politicians, including over a dozen heads of state. Both Russia's Vladimir Putin and Ukraine's Petro Poroshenko are implicated (common ground—wouldja look at that!), as well as figures like Sir Ian Cameron (father of British PM David Cameron), and the PM of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson (and Iceland is now in the midst of huge protests calling for Sigmundur's resignation). In addition to heads of state, there are shell companies linked to financial institutions under international sanction (i.e., North Korea, Syria), families of autocratic parties from Saudi Arabia to China...the list grows almost by the hour. ICIJ has them nearly sorted, here.
Journalists, representing over a hundred news organizations from across the globe, have been working on this project for the last year and a half; indeed, personally, the sheer professionalism in disseminating the information while not having any leaks is one of the most impressive things. There's a lesson in tradecraft for most intelligence agencies.
The notable dog that hasn't barked is the United States. I strongly suspect this isn't because of any lack of shell-company shenanigans here, oh no.
Buckle in, ladies and gents.
(And for anyone asking to examine the treasure trove for themselves, the leaked information will not, repeat not, be open-sourced. From the Wired article:)
edited 4th Apr '16 9:06:41 PM by SabresEdge
Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.