Stanley Kubrick once wrote the script to a film called I Stole 16 Million Dollars that was rejected by Kirk Douglas as badly written and never got made. Because of the Panama Papers, we now know that Kubrick’s millions were concealed in tax shelters, along with the riches of hundreds of other Americans.
“There is something very simple that people are missing about the Panama Papers leak,” says James Henry, managing director at Sag Harbor Group, a consultancy that specializes in economic, legal and tax strategies in Sag Harbor, New York. “And that is that Mossack Fonseca was a gritty little law firm in Panama doing grunt work, with dingy little storefronts all over the world.
In Oklahoma, a stone or brick home might save you from a tornado. But it might kill you if there’s an earthquake—and the Dills, who live in the one-story stone-and-mortar farmhouse with their five dogs, have been overwhelmed with quakes.
In December 10, Volkswagen Chairman Hans-Dieter Pötsch made a public admission: A group of the company’s engineers decided to cheat on emissions tests in 2005 because they couldn’t find a technical solution within the company’s “time frame and budget” to build diesel engines that would meet U.S. emissions standards. When the engineers did find a solution, he said, they chose to keep on cheating, rather than employ it.
