Daily Times

Dear Indian sub-continentals,

On April 3, when the Panama Papers made their debut, we were promised ‘leaktivism’ like Wikileaks-on-steroids that trumped the counter-espionage of Edward Snowden. ‘John Doe’ could have been a mythical financial double agent, and SüddeutscheZeitung (SZ) reporters Hollywood-like handlers for an elaborate counter-insurgency at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) on corrupt governors and financiers of criminal cartels. For over a year, SZ had access to all Mossack Fonseca’s (MF) files, one of the biggest law firmsspecialising in creating companies in a string of tax havens. SZ’s international partners had eight months to make an airtight case against black money-generation and money laundering. Contrary to the campaign’s PR, the entire investigation smacks of jugaad — a rule-bending shortcut to sensationalist success of very little relevance to us down South.

It was supposed to be just what the doctor ordered. Together, out of 168 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, we occupy the following ranks: Bangladesh 139, Bhutan 27, India 76, the Maldives an unranked grey-zone, Nepal 130, Pakistan 117, Sri Lanka 83. Minus the two outliers — gross nationally happy Bhutan and gross nationally unhappy Maldives — on average, we’re all pretty rank together in the famously corrupt 109th position!

You are onto something if you thought the Panama leaks was a bit foreign to you because we the above hardly feature despite our well-publicised problems with black money arising from punitive tax codes, political parties and officials — who use our treasuries like personal bank accounts — and corporates from legitimate and grey economies squirreling away income overseas by evading the taxes that be. This is because the ICIJ who processed the Panama Papers reached out to only 10 journalists from three countries out of our nine! Of 400 journalists from 76 countries concentrated mainly in Western Europe, according to ICIJ’s own Terra Metrics, that includes only one journalist from Sri Lanka, three from Pakistan and five from India. Heavyweight Bangladesh and runner-up Nepal do not even feature. It isn’t the best sample size and a missed opportunity to lay bare how people are made to live on the ‘simple bare necessities of life’ in the Global South.

Illuminating the shadow, science behind our banal evils is overlooked for more sensational subjects, which monopolise the world’s scarce attention and allow Europeans to shoot at eachother off the shoulders of publications worldwide that are not granted access befitting their own need to investigate financial crimes more relevant to them. The 107 handpicked broadcasters granted access to the documents enjoy exclusivity in first-hand reporting at the cost of their competition who are forced to mirror their findings. Manipulatively, the ICIJ’s ‘thematic-not-systematic” approach guides all focus to the EU’s idea of what is important in international relations today: the financing of dictators-already-on-the-decline like Assad; unpopular autocrats like Putin who habitually speak truth to NATO powers about their half-witted ‘Responsibility to Protect’ interventions, which may have enabled ISIS (incidentally harder to target on ICJ’s search engine); naughty undeclared government shareholders in failed Icelandic banks whose collapse made the EU triad (Germany, France and UK) cough up bailouts to contain the contagion; and enemies of their continental pastime — yes,I am referring to FIFA spoilers.

Wikileaks warns that the ICJ connections with the US government discount the integrity of news leaks. Curiously, US broadcasting giants were passed over for McClatchy (owner of small provincial newspapers). There’s nary a mention of Americans in Panama Papers published — only four prosecuted offenders. Many critics of the process see this as willful omission in exchange for using Washington DC as the consortium’s meeting place. Even as eclectic consumers of infotainment, we should mind these bloc-headed half-truths because even the Panama Papers have a shelf life. This makes it vital to examine whether due diligence was followed by ICIJ facilitators and SZ’s ‘EU triad dream-team’ consisting of the UK’s The Guardian and France’s Le Monde during the Panama process, while mining the 2.6 terabytes of MF documents.

In European newspapers, as in our mushrooming TV news debates, information is served with readymade, ideologically one-sided analyses. As everyone is aware of which publication tends to support the ‘social democratic left’ or the ‘classical liberal right” according to their target demographic’s tastes, it is commonplace for the educated to read around the news stories that interest them for a balanced understanding. In a leak of this magnitude, it is poignant to note that this ability was deliberately compromised. SZ, to whom John Doe released the data, is a leading leftist paper, more vocally socialist than most as it is located in traditionally conservative Bavaria. More worryingly, SZ scrimped on intellectual honesty by only sharing their info-monopoly with a core team consisting of like-minded left-leaning newspapers, The Guardian and Le Monde. Le Monde, in particular, is an interesting choice because Le Figaro, the more market freedom-friendly paper whose readership consists of taxpaying working professionals exceeded Le Monde’s circulation in 2014 by 15 percent,Le Monde’s pet demographic tends to be pro-establishment bureaucrats, who typify the economic biases of President Hollande, who upon election wanted big businesses to be taxed an unprecedented 75 percent, a maneuver that would have turned the country into “Cuba without sun,”says his own economics minister. Is this the kind of lobby we want to skew our discernment and laggard governmental reform as it struggles to differentiate tax evasion from tax competition?

Journalists do have a responsibility to protect their sources, but responsible reporting requires they first know their source to attest to its credibility to responsibly make that decision to publish. And it is emphatically not so with John Doe, who may either be the whistleblower fiscally irresponsible governments needed to bail water out of their capsizing budgetary boats or an external hacker as MF insists. But who listens to the big bad rich guy during populist media trials anyway? Knowing one’s source enough to distinguish courage from cybercrime is good practice akin to court’s assessing evidence for its admissibility. Media should not knowingly trample on people’s right to privacy just because it would be considered politically unpopular to haul them to court for violating their own standards. Unsurprisingly, Panama’s Lawyers Movement condemned the process as “cyber bullying [and] international cyber-terrorism.”We need to question the far greater quantum of collateral damage from farming out 11,500 files of raw data to unregulated private media houses without redacting personal information of individuals who may or may not be guilty of crimes, in the hope that their automated ‘personality strike-like’ search words targeting the rich and famous will divert unwelcome attention and scrutiny of God-knows-who from those who are literally just minding their own business!

Coordinating Panama Papers’ global release on April 3 was slick, but the self-congratulatory ‘making of’ videos by SZ and The Indian Express revealed many bloopers. The purpose-built search engine had its data uploaded in dribbles, which impeded investigative journalists combing through and compiling their stories, despite the search software being made available almost instantly upon media houses signing agreements with the ICIJ and SZ. FYI, these agreements haven’t been made available to the public by our transparency crusaders who continue to brazenly publish 40 plus years of MF contracts.

Some aspects of the release were impressive, like the use of rapidly modifiable open software like Apache Solr and Nuix, whereby SZ’s partners could make alterations to the search engine, conduct multi-filter searches and index information in real time even from scanned documents. However, the coverage thus far suggests that a lack of technical ability and the widespread search for sensationalism led most of the users to scan the information for every industrialist, celebrity and affluent person they could find, instead of harvesting the data cloud according to a more reliable and systematic set of variables, which would have explained whether their holdings overseas were legal or illegal before they named and shamed them. Western European welfare states in particular are known for their cultures of envy, whereby the middle class see anyone doing better than them as having taken them for a ride. Unfortunately, this has been SZ’s export to Indian and Pakistani media culture. In India, notwithstanding big names like Amitabh Bachchan, AishwaryaRai and VinodAdani, government officials are conspicuously absent. In politically self-conscious Pakistan, PML-N and PPP, the two major parties, bear the lion share of the allegations while infamous feudal lords and jihadis escape unmentioned.

As a Germanophile who wholeheartedly believes in the efficiency stereotype, this ‘politweaker’ is bitterly disappointed that the Panama investigation was full of holes and quick fixes, pointing to the processing of the wrong kind of ‘leak’. Leaks ought to be planned and coordinated better, making this a catastrophic sp