Reuters is reporting the Iceland’s prime minister has resigned over the revelations in the “Panamanian Papers” of his dealings:
Iceland’s Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson is to step down after leaked documents from a Panamanian law firm showed his wife owned an offshore company with big claims on collapsed Icelandic banks, his party said.
Gunnlaugsson became the first prominent casualty from the revelations in the so-called Panama Papers, which have cast light on the financial arrangements of an array of politicians and public figures across the globe and the companies and financial institutions they use.
I would be surprised if he were the last. Still not much word of Americans on the list.
I thought this Politico piece provided a good explanation, not the least because it worked in my first thoughts about Panama: Noriega. (Though the connection is minimal, I tend to agree with Reynold’s previous comment, that there is some type of path dependency here, where people are acting on recommendations from friends and associates and the invasion of Panama disrupted the path for Americans).
You’ll recall that was second on my list of explanations (right after the facetious explanation).
That said, would it be a scandal if Americans were identified? Romney had money in offshore accounts and I have no sense that it swayed anybody’s opinion of him. What appears to be damning is that are political leaders, particularly of third world countries (including Russia), that do not appear to have been able to earn that much money outside of political corruption.
I’m not all that familiar with Icelandic politics, but am willing to speculate in the context of the 2008-2011 financial crisis, being branded a terrorist state, and having its foreign deposits seized as collateral, that Iceland was a third-world country recently.
PD:
Maybe the Russians pay Putin a billion a year. If that’s the case we may be significantly underpaying our politicians.
Now there is some dispute about whether or not the PM resigned. Bjork for PM!