Regarding the Panama Papers the next weeks seems to become interesting. But one can say that some of the until now mentioned entities are not so unknown or even shrouded in absolut secrecy: Take the company which is seen now as pure evil and responsible for the activities of the bad guys around the world: Mossack Fonseca. Nearly all newspaper talk about an "unknown", "secret", "hidden" company, somewhere located in the more shady corners of the world. But is this true? As far I can trust my own database I already found entries and documents e.g. from 2000, when Mossack Fonseca was enlisted in a directory of "Banking, Trust & Financial Services":
In the face of successfull business no wonder that in 2003 a worker of the company came to this statement:
There are a lot of more entries to find and I only came to those I find in my own database. Some of them were already leaked or hacked years ago and also the name the companies and people, who benefit from off-shore services:
Years ago thousands of entities from a Panama database were ready to be analysed with software - as it is done today again. Panama is only one little, of course important place in this network:
A discussion about Offshore (and Onshore!) service providers is necessary and it seems not to be legitimate or even feasible to condemn now every company in this business. Too many people without any deeper knowledge or expertise now start to argue on a low level.