Wrap-up: Of shoring up corruption, worldwide

Nearly a week before, the world woke up to one of largest-ever exposes on offshore shell companies, involving as many as 12 current and former presidents, monarchs and prime ministers, 140 politicians and officials, and hundreds of thousands of individuals.

The mine of data, provided by an anonymous source to a German newspaper, relates to 2,14,488 offshore companies floated by people of various nationalities with the help of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.

While setting up of an offshore company is per se is not illegal, these are also used to avoid tax or stash away ill-gotten funds without revealing the identity of owners of the beneficiaries.

Of 11.5 million files, 36,957 relate to over 500 Indians. The Modi government has already set up a panel to probe into information unearthed by the list, which includes Aishwarya Rai, Amitabh Bachchan, IndiaBulls owner Sameer Gehlaut, DLF promoter K.P. Singh, Vinod Adani of the Adani Group, etc.

While those who had stashed away ill-gotten wealth will surely face action and get their image tarnished, the expose will have a wider implication on underground financial system. It casts a doubt on the secrecy that tax havens provide to high networth individuals in this digital age, where a techie sitting in a remote village in India or China or elsewhere could hack into the so-called secure servers of banks or wealth firms.

A conversation between Mossack Fonseca and its client is indicative of this. According to Economist, “Some nervous clients of Mossack Fonseca three years ago (after a similar leak on tax evasion) asked if their secrets were safe. The law firm told them not to fret; its data centre was state-of-the-art and its encryption algorithm was world class.”

But Mossack Fonseca was proved wrong. After this expose, can anyone bet on the security of their data in the cyberworld