Guardian editorial: Obama passed the Panama Papers test; Cameron failed

[pampango]

The secretive wealth of public power has been exposed as never before. This poses a serious test for politicians, which Barack Obama passed but David Cameron failed

After a five-day outpouring of secrets from an obscure office in Panama, a prime minister is out in Reykavik, a president is on the ropes in Buenos Aires and the censors are putting in serious overtime in Beijing. A new regime in world football has been tainted with old-fashioned sleaze, Vladimir Putin has been moved to dismiss a paper trail linking his friends with billions of dubious dollars as a plot, and some big names from showbiz have discovered that they share a lawyer with the associates of gold bullion robbers.

And don’t forget Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president whose promise to “wipe the slate clean of business interests” was swallowed by the west, but who it transpires was – at the very hour of his troops’ gravest danger – concentrating instead on setting up offshore firms. The simultaneous embroilment of Mr Poroshenko and the circle of his arch-enemy, Mr Putin, creates a dreadful sense that secretive adventures on treasure islands are simply what ruling elites do these days, irrespective of which side they may be on.

Barack Obama, who has long bemoaned tax havens, including in the books that he wrote before he entered the White House, has found precisely the right tone this week. Making an unscheduled appearance in the briefing room, he did not downplay the problem, but instead talked it up as “huge” and “important”. There was no labouring of the distinction between tax evasion and avoidance, no pained insistence that there was nothing inherently wrong with investing offshore. Such pleading would have lost the 99% who have never had any need to shunt their money across the ocean. Instead, the president explained that the real concern was not law breaking, but rather “that a lot of this stuff is legal, not illegal”.

What a sorry contrast with Mr Cameron. No 10 started the week trying to maintain that whether or not Britain’s first family had money offshore was a purely “private matter”. Three incomplete and decidedly murky “clarifications” followed before finally, three full days later, the PM arranged an interview so that he could fess up to the ultimately undeniable fact that he had in the past personally profited from an investment in the offshore fund run by his father, an operation that never paid UK tax, and had at times boasted about this.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/08/the-guardian-view-on-the-panama-papers-five-days-that-shook-the-world