The deliberate lack of transparency of tax havens is what makes them attractive for companies around the world. Recent estimates place the size of global offshore assets somewhere in the range of 7 to 32 trillion dollars. The Panama Papers data leak has given new urgency to the challenge of dealing with tax haven secrecy.
Since then, enhanced transparency and increased available information have made it possible to reconstruct the financial mechanisms that underpin offshore tax havens and reveal the ways in which companies exploit offshore havens to hide their secrets.
Based on data collected from the Panama Papers, in this podcast Hannes Wagner, Associate Professor of Finance at Bocconi University, explains how tax havens work.