Anatomy of the Panamanian Plum - ForumDaily
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Anatomy of the Panamanian Plum

The grandiose Panamanian plum, eclipsed in its volume all previous leaks of classified information, recalled one useful rule.

“If you have a law firm that has highly sensitive financial information about the most powerful people in the world,” Fortune magazine wrote about the leak of 11,5 million documents from the database of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, “then you should probably update your software more often than every seven years."

So far, no one knows for sure how an incredible amount of data about secret accounts of the rich and famous leaked from the bins of the world's fourth offshore registrar, but experts at the well-informed Wired UK website say that Mossack Fonseca computer systems are astonishingly vulnerable to hacking.

For example, the client portal of this company uses a version of the software Drupal, which has not been updated since 2013, and is vulnerable to hackers. According to Wired, this version has at least 25 vulnerabilities.

The Fonseca email system has not been updated since 2009 of the year.

The company also does not encode its emails. “If I were their client, I would be very concerned that they communicate with me using such outdated technology,” Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey told Wired.

Fonseca told its customers that the leak of documents, at least in part, is due to the hacking of her email. In the light of the diverse nature of the leaked information, experts are confident that its source was not only the mail or the customer portal. If the internal systems of the office were serviced just as carelessly as the client's, then it was quite possible to steal the millions of documents that would require 26 000 pickups to be transported.

Lawyers generally handle confidential documents rather casually, for example, they carry them in cars and carry folders with clients' secret papers with them.

Co-owner of the office Ramon Fonsek said that the data was not leaked to any of the employees, and that the attack was from servers located abroad.

Erke Boyten from the University of Kent, on the contrary, believes that the documents were merged from inside the office. Since this happened gradually, she suggests that the source of the leak, on the one hand, had access to the secrets of Fonseca, but, on the other, held a high enough position to copy them in one sitting, and was forced to do it in an hour with a teaspoon.

Woodward quoted above says that the documents were stolen either by a hacker who was suddenly lucky, or "by some state that was bored with tax evasion."

The German Zyuddeutsche Zeitung, to which the documents were transmitted, reports little about their source. At the end of 2014, he (or she) told her in a coded chat that his life was in jeopardy, but that he would like to share secret information from the Fonseca law firm with the newspaper.

When asked if there was a lot of data, he wrote: “More than you have ever seen.”

Documents that began in 1970's continued to flow into the newspaper for almost a year. They list 214 488 offshore companies associated with government officials from dozens of countries. Draining includes emails, contracts, scanned documents and minutes. A full list of companies and individuals referred to in connection with offshore companies will be announced in May.

At first glance, the Panamanian megasliv contains information unflattering for the Russian leadership. 2 billion dollars in offshore accounts of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle are mentioned, although not himself.

Putin himself kept silent for several days on this topic, and then, as usual, made it clear that the leak was organized by the Americans in order to “shake things up from the inside, make us more docile and brush our hair the way they want”.

I do not stop to marvel at the imagery of Putin’s speech and I envy a little.

In the USA, this version was considered, rather, as a curiosity and did not bother to elaborate in detail on the principle “you don’t hesitate for every one of you”. Instead, they pushed another one, according to which the discharge was the work of Russia itself.

At first glance, this counter-version is absurd, but it was put forward not by anyone, but by well-known Russian economist Clifford Gaddy from the liberal Brookings Institution, who consulted with the RF Ministry of Finance in 1990-s. On Thursday, he published on the website of his institute a blog outlining his hypothesis of Russian origin plum.

According to Gaddy, the electronic bins Fonseca hacked at the instigation of Moscow by some hacker, who then sent the prey to a German newspaper. Gaddy believes it is no coincidence that the documents sent by the hacker do not contain specific information about Putin. Everyone is inclined by the notorious 2 billion, but they are tied to Putin very indirectly. He survived a much more serious suspicion of corruption.

At the same time, the drain contains a lot of data that put other statesmen in an extremely awkward position. According to Gaddy, this may create the impression that the abuses that are imputed to Putin are not exceptions, but are typical of many leaders.

The documents almost no compromising on the Americans. The only, at the moment, exception is the little-known Chicago financier. This is partly why the Panama plum made less noise here than in many other countries.

Gaddis suggests that the lack of data on US citizens is not accidental: they are held in order to blackmail the Yankees later.

Gaddy later wrote the Washington Post that he himself was not sure about his constructions, but added that this option should be explored. Professor Karen Davisha, author of a book on corruption in Russia, disagreed with him. She strongly does not believe in this version, although a number of considerations speak in favor of Gaddy.

For example, Putin did not suffer at all as a result of the Panamanian plum, although he hit other leaders, for example, Briton David Cameron and Ukrainian Petro Poroshenko, not to mention the prime minister of Iceland, who was forced to resign.

The almost complete absence of American names in documents is explained in different ways. Some suspect that someone is deliberately holding back such incriminating evidence in order to shoot it at the right moment. Or analysts simply haven’t gotten around to it yet.

On the other hand, Americans prefer to park their assets not in Panama, but on the Isle of Man, on the Cayman Islands or in good old Switzerland. In addition, the local IRS tax department has long crammed a hand in search of hidden assets of Americans, so it is possible that they sin in this part less than other nations.

On the left, as expected, accusations are heard at the address of "global capitalism", which supposedly has to retard assets in overseas jurisdictions. But, as clever Megan McArdle of Bloomberg notes, with the exception of Iceland, Panamanian plums mainly include countries that can only be accused of being “capitalist”: Pakistan, Iraq, Russia, Ukraine, Egypt.

Read also on ForumDaily:

American economist suspected Russia in the “sink” of the Panamanian dossier

Panamanian archive: the scale of the leak and the names of the defendants

“Picked up and blind”: Putin first commented on the “Panamanian scandal”

In the "Panama dossier" found a link between Hillary Clinton and the Kremlin

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