Napier, MSCNewsWire, 9 April 2016 - Panama was such an obvious hit for a United States-focus data heist that the real mystery is why nobody saw it coming, or, if they did, why no evasive action was taken.

Premier John Key will hold the line on New Zealand’s anonymous foreign asset registration business considered to be worth around $30 million to local lawyers. He has refused to be panicked and has kicked for touch by setting in motion an independent arbitrator on the raw topic.

Until the release of the Panama Papers the United States censure of New Zealand of these disguised registrations had focussed on a self-proclaimed leadership and thus influence over Oceania national repositories such as Niue, Tonga, and Vanuatu.

In the event these along with New Zealand’s own shell entity packaging practitioners presented a sector too fractionated certainly in terms of data centres to warrant external intrusion.Panama in contrast presented a monolithic and obvious target.

The two biggest clues are interrelated. They are the volume in the filched documents of emails and the absence of recognisable United States nationals.

The sub routine and underpinning mystery is why the people sending the emails the otherwise secretive bankers and lawyers sent them as plain text?

Not so well known is that many of these emails featured things like Power Point expositions, thus ensuring an easy-to-grasp picture of the wiring of the deals just in case the words alone had been insufficient.

Many of these messages and their attachments were routinely intercepted before they in fact reached anyone in Panama.

Now we come to the absence of recognisable United States citizens.

Their emails, the ones identifying the entities to benefit from the anonymous shell companies, were encrypted.

United States legal and banking practitioners have known something that continues to elude their counterparts elsewhere to the effect that an email is a public document.

United States citizens have also known that Panama and its tax avoidance/evasion activities have been on their country’s target list for many years, most notably through Panama’s determined and flourishing allocation of merchant marine flags of convenience.

This open sore became inflamed when US Democrats used the 2011 free-trade agreement with Panama as leverage to force Panama to agree to a separate tax accord, which was aimed at improving taxpayer disclosure and discouraging secretive offshore holdings.

Curiously this arrangement was ignored elsewhere, most surprisingly in Asia. It was certainly ignored by Panama and of course this business-as-usual was revealed in the intercepted emails, the ones from Europe where ignorance was still bliss.

Back now to Mr Key. Few people of any influence or power outside the United States understand quite so perfectly the thinking processes of the US governing class.

He knows that in the matter of tax refuges it is no good going on about the United States’ own island dependencies which make New Zealand’s look in comparison like piggy banks.

It is certainly useless to bring up the matter of their on shore ones such as the states of Wyoming, Nevada and Delaware. 

Mr Key knows that he must leave all this and more unsaid. He must quietly focus on the rather lesser-understood world of correspondent banking.

From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk     This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.