Panama Papers: A Weapon Used Against Political Enemies of the Elite

France’s National Front and Britain’s UKIP targeted

On Monday, Le Pen cited the papers selectively “leaked” by a Soros, Rockefeller and Rothschild funded “investigative journalism” outfit, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. “The control-free movement of men, goods and capital, coupled with high finance’s stranglehold on all levels of the economy, can only produce global fraudulent and money-laundering systems,” she said.

The left-center French newspaper Le Monde followed up Le Pen’s remarks by publishing an account implicating her close friends and family members in a tax evasion scheme operated out of a shell company in Hong Kong. The Le Monde story says Frédéric Chatillon, a long time friend of Le Pen, was responsible for moving €300,000 into the offshore haven. Chatillon took to his Facebook page and argued the operation is entirely legal.

The political establishment in France was dealt a blow in December when the populist and anti-EU National Front made unexpected election gains, particularly in Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie where Le Pen won 40.6% of the vote. The previous year the party received 4,712,461 votes in the European Parliament election, finishing first with 24.86% of the vote and 24 of France’s 74 seats. France’s Socialist party appealed to the center-right Les Républicains to cobble together a bipartisan alliance capable of defeating Le Pen, but the effort was opposed by former President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Former British Tory and UKIP donor Banks denies any involvement in a network of tax havens exposed by the Panama Papers. “It has been reported in The Guardian that Mr. Arron Banks was named in the leaked Panama files,” a spokesman for Banks said. “The claim is not true. Mr. Banks has never used the lawyer named and therefore does not appear in the leaked information.” He said companies mentioned in the article are defunct, do not trade and Banks “looks forward to receiving an apology” from The Guardian and the Daily Mail.

Oh dear. Look who turns up in the Panama Papers. http://gu.com/p/4tvn8?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other …

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. ( Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s