A tax haven in America’s heartland
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 4 October 2021
⏱️ ? minutes
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Summary
The United States has long condemned secretive offshore tax havens where the rich and powerful hide their money. But a burgeoning American trust industry now shelters the assets of wealthy foreigners by promising even greater secrecy and protection. That same secrecy has insulated the industry from meaningful oversight and allowed it to gain new footholds in states like South Dakota and Alaska.
The Washington Post and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) gained unprecedented insight into the money flowing into U.S. trusts through a trove of more than 11.9 million documents, among the largest of its kind, maintained by financial services providers around the world.
Their findings are revealed in a new investigation, the Pandora Papers, that exposes how foreign political and corporate leaders or their relatives moved money and other assets from long-established tax havens to obscure trust companies in the United States. In many cases, the assets were connected to individuals or companies accused of fraud, bribery and human rights abuses in some of the world’s most vulnerable communities.
In this audio report, Post reporter Debbie Cenziper, producer Ted Muldoon and ICIJ reporter Will Fitzgibbon travel from the sugar cane fields of the Dominican Republic to the beaches of California to back rooms of Sioux Falls to examine how this industry came to be, who profits from it and whom it harms.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | And this is not a partisan issue. |
| 0:05.1 | Just 10 years ago, a Republican-led Congress cracked down on corporations moving offshore |
| 0:09.3 | tax havens like the Cayman Islands. |
| 0:12.3 | Offshore tax havens in places like Bermuda. |
| 0:16.0 | A lot of companies also evade taxes through tax havens in Switzerland of Bermuda in the |
| 0:22.3 | Cayman Islands. |
| 0:25.8 | The US government has been extremely vocal that it does not like tax havens. |
| 0:32.1 | Wealthy people can use offshore systems to hide assets from taxes and investigations. |
| 0:37.9 | And yet, the laws on the books in several different states have made the US a tax haven. |
| 0:45.1 | These laws have created a thriving industry. |
| 0:47.5 | A lot of people protect their wealth here. |
| 0:50.1 | And now, we know who some of those people are. |
| 0:55.5 | We know this because of the Pandora papers. |
| 0:59.0 | The Pandora papers are millions of newly obtained financial documents that the Washington Post |
| 1:04.1 | and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists have been investigating. |
| 1:09.6 | And these documents allowed the Post and ICIJ to essentially follow the money. |
| 1:15.6 | In this episode, we're talking about one of the stories that they found. |
| 1:19.6 | How they traced direct lines from one of the most rural states in the country to super |
| 1:24.5 | rich and powerful people around the world. |
| 1:28.2 | Some of those people are prominent politicians and business tycoons. |
| 1:32.5 | And some of those people amass their wealth amid credible accusations of crimes or human |
| 1:37.5 | rights abuses. |
... |
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