April 14, 2016
Tax authorities from the world’s richest nations yesterday probed a mass of murky offshore dealings revealed in the huge Panama Papers data leak, just hours after police raided the law firm at the centre of the scandal.
The leak of 11.5 million confidential financial documents from Panamanian law office Mossack Fonseca offered international tax officials meeting in Paris an unprecedented trove of data to delve into alleged wrongdoing, officials said.
Tax investigators discussed how to cooperate and share data unearthed in the Panama Papers, according to a statement released after the meeting by the 38-nation advanced economies club, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Details of the talks, which brought together tax authorities from the OECD and the Group of 20 large economies, were not disclosed.
Vitor Gaspar, who heads the public finances department at the IMF, said from Washington that the international community “cannot afford to spend more time on talk and rhetoric with no effective results”.
He called “simply unacceptable” the perception that the well-off are not paying their fair share when “…in many places around the world people are asked to contribute more to public finances…”
France is also urging the European Union and all OECD member states to follow suit.
Such an international designation would deal a heavy blow to Panama’s vital financial services sector, which the government has been trying to make more transparent.
The European Union unveiled plans Tuesday to force the world’s biggest multinationals to faithfully report earnings and pay their fair share of taxes, saying the Panama Papers scandal demonstrated the need for change.