The leak of 11.5 million documents from Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca has reheated a debate about tax and transparency that in truth hasn’t much cooled since the banking crisis. And from a narrow legal industry perspective, it will pile additional pressure on the offshore community.Not because the biggest story in recent memory with a law firm at its heart is a legal story – it’s a policy story – but because the disclosures will have reverberations felt by many professionals in the global legal market.
The point is less about the substance of the leaks themselves as they have been reported so far. The scale of the data may dwarf Snowden, WikiLeaks and the Pentagon Papers but in comparison the substance of the disclosures are less dramatic.