Tax avoidance/evasion in Bangladesh hardly required an offshore company in the 90s and 2000s. And that might also explain Bangladesh’s fairly light presence in the trove of Offshore Leaks.
The release of the Paradise Papers brings to 67, the number of Bangladeshi ‘Officers’ named in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ database of offshore leaks, that commenced in 2013 with its first data-dump in April of that year hailed as “the biggest hit against international tax fraud of all times”.
That was the precursor to last year’s blockbuster Panama Papers, which made Mossack Fonseca a household name around the planet, and caused not one but two democratically elected prime ministers to step down from their job - Iceland’s Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson, followed more recently by Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan. Hence the hype and excitement informing airwaves and column inches, as the Washington-based ICIJ announced the latest trove of secretly obtained data it was unloading for public scrutiny.
But is there any actual evidence of wrongdoing? Can the authorities step in? Anything that will stand in court?
The Paradise Papers are some 13.4 million files or records relating to Appleby, one of a handful of major international “offshore legal service providers”, and their dealings with clients from around the world that were passed to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and then shared with the ICIJ. This batch is notable for the host of celebrities that one encounters trawling through the data, itself a dizzying task, from pop singer Bono to the British royal family, including Queen Elizabeth. Eleven Bangladesh-based ‘officers’ appear in the Paradise Papers - comprise the names of 10 individuals, and 1 firm.
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