Paradise Papers

Here we go again. Another treasure trove of documents showing what the ultra-rich are doing with their money. Psst! They're HIDING it so they don't have to pay taxes. 

from Wiki

The Paradise Papers is a set of 13.4 million confidential electronic documents relating to offshore investment that were leaked to a German newspaper and released on 5 November 2017 into the public domain.^[1] The documents originate from the offshore law firm Appleby, the corporate services providers Estera and Asiaciti Trust, and business registries in 19 tax jurisdictions.^[2] They contain the names of more than 120,000 people and companies.^[3] Among those whose financial affairs are mentioned are Queen Elizabeth II,^[4] the President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, and the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross.^[5] According to the Boston Consulting Group, the amount of money involved is around $10 trillion.

On 20 October 2017, an anonymous Reddit user hinted at the existence of the Paradise Papers.^[7] Later that month, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) approached the offshore law firm Appleby with allegations of wrongdoing. Appleby said that some of its data had been stolen in a cyberattack the previous year, and denied ICIJ's allegations.^[8] After the documents were published, the company stated that there was "no evidence of wrongdoing", they "...are a law firm which advises clients on legitimate and lawful ways to conduct their business", and "We do not tolerate illegal behaviour".^[9]

The documents were acquired by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which had also obtained the Panama Papers in 2016. The name "Paradise Papers" reflects the so-called tax havens, or "tax paradises" involved. The data comprises some 13.4 million documents—totaling about 1.4 terabytes—from two offshore service providers, Appleby and Asiaciti Trust, and from the company registers of 19 tax havens.^[10] In contrast to the Panama Papers, which involved only a single country, many countries were involved in this data leak. Süddeutsche Zeitung journalists contacted the ICIJ, which has been investigating the documents with 100 media partners. The consortium made the data available to said partners on a platform created specifically for the project, allowing journalists across the globe to do collaborative investigative work. The documents were released by the consortium on 5 November 2017.^[5][11]

According to the papers, Facebook, Apple, Uber, Nike, Walmart, Allianz, Siemens, McDonalds, and Yahoo! are among the corporations that own offshore companies, as well as Allergan, the manufacturer of Botox. According to The Express Tribune, "Apple, Nike, and Facebook avoided billions of dollars in tax using offshore companies."^[14]

A Kremlin-owned firm, VTB Bank, put $191 million into DST Global, an investment firm part of Mail.ru Group and founded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, which used it to buy a large share of Twitter in 2011. A subsidiary of the Kremlin-controlled Gazprom funded an investment company that partnered with DST Global to buy shares in Facebook, reaping millions when the social media giant went public in 2012. Twitter similarly went public in 2013. The US government sanctioned VTB in 2014 because of the Russian invasion of Crimea, but DST Global had sold its stake in Twitter by then. Four days after the Facebook IPO, a DST Global subsidiary sold more than 27 million shares of Facebook for roughly $1 billion.^[15]

In 2009, Glencore, an Anglo–Swiss multinational commodity trading and mining company, loaned $45 million to Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler in exchange for his help with officials of the Democratic Republic of Congo in negotiations over a joint venture with state-owned Gécamines at the Katanga copper mine. Glencore, which had effectively taken over Katanga, agreed to vote for the joint venture. The loan document specifically provided that repayment would be owed if agreement was not reached within three months. Gertler and Glencore have denied wrong-doing.^[16][17]

The Australian branch of Glencore has been demonstrated to have carried out some $25 billion in cross-currency interest rate swaps, complex financial instruments the Australian Taxation Office suspects of being used to avoid paying taxes in Australia.^[18]

Original. If the GOP really wants to reduce the deficit, how about going after some of this $10 trillion stored offshore!

You can find ICIJ here, with more details.