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Panama Papers Flap Threatens New Zealand’s Fledgling Foreign Banking Industry

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Affair underlines United States Determination to Flush Out Anonymous Assets

Napier, MSCNewsWire, 7 April 2016 -

Having smoked out Switzerland as the world headquarters of secret asset deposits, the United States is vigilant in the matter of the now dispossessed off shore banking swarm nesting somewhere else. In Panama for example, a country created by the United States in order to construct the canal.

Certain characteristics of the Panama Papers point to a centrally driven operation especially in terms of the media selected to disseminate the results of the expose. At the hub is the Munich daily newspaper, also a creation of the United States when it was granted one of the first German publishing licences by the victorious and US-led allies at the end of World War 2.

The other European main participants, the Guardian and Le Monde are run on a collectivist and collegial basis as is the BBC which operates under a British government charter.In the United States itself the mid-range McClatchy chain with its flagship the Sacramento Bee was similarly selected.

The Washington Post and New York Times were sidelined as was the Murdoch media and this indicates the need to avoid powerful proprietors who might have had personal second thoughts, and also the danger of distracting showboating reporters stealing the limelight.

The expose has all the signs of a server farm snatch. The preponderant weight of documentation lifted was in email format.. These emails remain the lifeblood of the expose just because they contain the names, the real ones, of the people behind the Panama deals.

This is because the official documentation in the form of registers, legal papers, and bearer notes is necessarily in the name of nominees, the local stooges acting for the real owners, the ones far away from Panama.

These emails exposed will reveal that much of the transacting was done by banks on behalf of their clients. These are the very banks that United States authorities are anxious to intercept on their way to finding a long term true alternative to Switzerland.

Especially the US authorities want to prevent the bank swarm settling in Singapore.

In the drip feed exposes to date there have been the usual suspects such as FIFA and the ruling cliques of Russia and China. But no Americans.

The most likely reason is that they have so many havens in their own country due to the immense and differering state wide levels of accommodation or otherwise in terms of levels of disclosure.

Another conundrum is why it took so long, over a year, from the original papers heist to the recent disclosure of it.

Even considering that the total archive equates in volume to that of a New Zealand government department, the methodology involved in the original heist would have been compatible with big data handling systems which would have accomplished much of the sifting and sorting.

As it was, the expose collided with the firmament of the US primaries, allowing the excluded Washington Post and New York Times to treat the leak rather gingerly and at arms length.The affair has to be taken seriously in New Zealand vaguely implicated as still yet another haven along the lines of Malta.

New Zealand identified Switzerland as a model economy to follow in the 1970s. Originally as a model for precision high value manufacturing, and much later as a banking model.

There has been some success and indications are that New Zealand law firms take in around $30 million each year in establishments and service fees.

This is important as a national economic strategy in that it compensates if only in a tiny way for the immense outflow of money each year to the foreign banks, notably the Australian ones, that dominate joint stock banking here.

The New Zealand government has bent backwards to fall in behind the wishes of the United States, notably over he Russian embargo and in supporting and cheer-leading the US-inspired Trans Pacific Partnership.

The Panama Papers affair is a shot-across- the bows that the United States now expects New Zealand to fall into line over these havens too.

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