The best picture I saw this week was the one where a man is staring at a billboard that reads “the rich and powerful piss on us, but the media tell us it’s raining”. It was in Twitter in reference to the belated, and mostly half-hearted, coverage by our local press of revelations contained in the Pandora Papers expose.
Let’s put this in context. As the Financial Times sweetly explains, we had the 2016 Panama Papers that “shone a light on tax crimes taking place via offshore tax havens”. I seem to recall a senior Kenyan judge being mentioned here. Then we had the 2017 Paradise Papers which “tended to focus more on companies’ creative tax avoidance”. This latest expose is less about tax avoidance or evasion, and more about “the use of offshore trusts and shell companies by the super-rich and political classes”.
