  After the leak of 11.5 million documents from the Panamanian corporation
Mossack Fonseca, an intricate network of offshore business entities has been
revealed. The emerging picture is that of legal entities, either individuals or
companies, involved in offshore activities and transactions with several tax
havens simultaneously which establish, indirectly, an effective network of
countries acting on tax evasion. The analysis of this network quantitatively
uncovers a strongly connected core (a rich-club) of countries whose indirect
interactions, mediated by legal entities, form the skeleton for tax evasion
worldwide. Intriguingly, the rich-club mainly consists of well-known tax havens
such as British Virgin Islands and Hong Kong, and major global powers such as
China, Russia, United Kingdom and United States of America. The analysis
provides a new way to rank tax havens because of the role they play in this
network, and the results call for an international coordination on taxation
policies that take into account the complex interconnected structure of tax
evaders in a globalized economy.
