Message from Paradise

Increase transparency, beef up regulation, and cut taxes

For the second year in a row, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich, have run an expose that shows how companies across the world use offshore entities to avoid paying taxes. Paradise Papers, as it is being called, is the largest ever leak of such financial data — at 13.4 million files, it is bigger than last year’s Panama Papers expose. This time the records pertain to two firms – Bermuda’s Appleby and Singapore’s Asiaciti – and show how 19 tax havens have been used by the global elite to trick tax officials in different