Who Would Have Thought

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This has been a week of revelations, of scandals broken, and of illusions shattered.

Has it though? Or are we just collectively guilty of looking the other way, not wanting to know, and wilfully ignoring the realities of life and human nature? And then being sanctimonious when reminded of them?

Inconveniently, as usual, the truth lies somewhere in between.

Let’s start with that obscure UK gynaecologist (!), Dr Mark Bonar who in a masterful spoof of The Sunday Times has been found liberally to be prescribing all sorts of pharmaceuticals to whoever bothers to come to his practice, regardless of gender by the way – the problem being, of course, that these “patients” of his under scrutiny now were not just ordinary folks like you and me who can administer to ourselves just about anything we want (and it does help if it’s a legal substance, as I hasten to add in the interest of Political Correctness), but rather members of a select, minute, but ridiculously revered and richly rewarded tribe of contemporaries who are expected to play by certain special rules as they go about making a living.

You see, “doping” is so not permitted under sport’s global Code of Conduct.

The cynic in me is tempted to say it’s hardly a surprise that highly paid professional athletes who can ply their lucrative trade only for a finite, in fact rather short period of time, will yield to the temptation of seeking performance-enhancing drugs in order to be able, literally, to go the extra mile – and do it faster than their competitors.

And should we not ask ourselves whether we, the sensation-seeking public, are not complicit in wanting ever-more excitement, ever-more entertainment, and ever-more super-human performances and records? The revered Olympic ideals of “Citius, altius, fortius” gone out of control?

Here is what I mean.

Without being an expert in the discipline of cycling, just to choose one endurance sport, it does seem quite clear to me that, no matter how talented your body, how capable your brain of pushing yourself beyond limits where most others would just stop, and how hard you train, from an early age on, it is impossible to cross the Alps and the Pyrenees on a (racing) bike in the heat of summer for four weeks on end within the daily time limits for the individual stages imposed by the management of the Tour de France on a mere diet of spaghetti (lots) and vitamin supplements (manifold) consumed in the evening. Oh, and let’s not forget the proverbial glass of red wine to make you sleep better.

So, what’s an ambitious professional cyclist going to do?

Leaving aside the fact that as long as the rules and regulations of his sport forbid “doping” and he is therefore cheating, knowingly and along with many of his competitors probably, thereby creating a totally new kind of “level playing field”, the real issue I have with this scenario is that young, up-and-coming athletes will be “introduced” to the practice while still underage: “Look, kid, you can go a long way. But if you want to be serious about your sport, you will have to start taking these.”

And driven by the natural ambition of wanting to do as well as possible, often combined with a sense of obligation to parents and obedience to coaches, they will find it even harder to say no. A truly depressing thought.

But then, there is now that other, much grander case of unappetising, unwelcome, and hence best quietly ignored facts rising to the surface of our collective attention, like it or not – the infamous “Panama Papers”.

While Julian Assange is still holed up in the UK Embassy of Ecuador and Edward Snowden continues enjoying the hospitality of Vladimir Putin in Moscow, the competition (although I doubt they view themselves that way) has struck gold and landed a major coup, maybe the biggest ever.

A group of serious investigative journalists centred around the German (who would have thought indeed), Munich-based daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) have now published first details from a total of 11.5 million leaked documents, equal to 2.6 terabytes to those, unlike me, who don’t think in terms of words or pages anymore. – In case you wondered, the old-school journalist’s rule of thumb is ten words to a line, 30 lines to a page, and therefore 300 words per page. Those were the days.

This mountain of documents was so much to review, digest, and make any sense of that it is not surprising the guys at SZ decided to parcel it out among the jaw-dropping total of some 400 journalists at 100 media outlets in 80 countries. Amazingly, they also claim not to have paid a penny for such a bonanza as they were obviously dealing with one seriously angry whistle blower whose identity of course, following the rules of the game and at least for now, remains undisclosed.

Remember “Deep Throat”? If not, check out the 1976 film, All the President’s Men (Director Alan J. Pakula) which tells the story of how The Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (played by Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) uncover the details of the Watergate scandal that eventually led to President Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974 (the only American President ever to have ended in this ignominious way). It remains the Gold Standard of investigative reporting to this day. And viewed from the other side, a timeless case study of how not to manage a crisis.

While many, many movies have been made about journalists, there is a sub-genre dealing specifically with investigative reporting, in the tradition of All the President’s Men. The latest is of course Spotlight, directed by Joe McCarthy and starring Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, and Michael Keaton. It tells the true story of how the Boston Globe uncovered the massive scandal of child molestation and cover-up within the local Catholic Archdiocese, shaking the entire Church to its core. And it just won the 2016 Academy Award for Best Motion Picture of the Year. – Following The Rule of Three, which other one do you remember?

The secret of the identity of “Deep Throat”, by the way, was lifted only much later. In 2005, 31 years after Nixon's departure from office and eleven years after his death, a family attorney stated it was former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Associate Director Mark Felt who by then was battling dementia and had denied any links previously. It seems he hated the Nixon administration and wanted to protect the integrity of his own outfit.

I’m always ambiguous about the motivation and character of such anonymous informants. On the one hand, wrongdoing should of course be exposed, especially if it is endemic and institutionalised within an organisation. Declaration of interest: I have just taken and passed with flying colours one of our Company’s online Code of Conduct courses on the issue – and immediately printed out the diploma to add to my already proud collection of such achievements. I’m as good and faithful and compliant a corporate citizen as the next guy.

On the other hand, to gain access to this type and mass of information the whistle blower must also have been involved or at least “in the know” for a while – so at what point, and why, did they suddenly develop a sense of uneasiness and discover their conscience? And before taking their grievance to the media, did they ever try to talk to anyone inside their organisation about it?

Plus, aren’t they betraying their loyalty, not just to their employer, but more importantly, to their colleagues who may well be unaware of anything untoward going on? Wouldn’t it be more respectable just to quit?

Not an easy one, I find. You tell me.

Anyhow, this new trove of information, published with the precision of a military operation across time zones on Sunday, is about the astonishing number of 214,000 “shell companies” founded on behalf of their clients by Mossack Fonseca, a hitherto obscure Panamanian (yes, that’s the Central American country with the isthmus and the Canal; more on this later) law firm called after its founders / owners Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca. Little known, which is how they like it best no doubt, but with a network of more than 40 offices worldwide you will be impressed to learn.

Speaking of Snowden, he did not fail to send out a tweet immediately, more than anything probably just to remind the world he was still around: “Biggest leak in the history of data journalism just went live, and it's about corruption. http://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/ en/ 18:48 - 3 Apr 2016”

Thanks for the heads-up, Ed. But you may have been a little premature, or should have been slightly more circumspect, in your public statement of outrage as, according to early disclosures, your gracious host and his immediate entourage are among those implicated. But then, so is David Cameron’s late father, Ian Cameron, and the Prime Minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson.

Who would have thought.

Siggy, as impeccable sources close to the government in Reykjavik tell me his friends call him, made a right mess of things when he walked out of a TV interview with the Swedish public broadcaster, SVT as the two journalists started quizzing him about his Panamanian connection – no doubt, this had not been agreed beforehand, so he never saw it coming and had some cause for feeling ambushed – but he didn’t help himself by staying on in the room, standing up and justifying himself clumsily on-camera. Two absolute no-no’s, and I wonder if anyone ever media-trained him. Bottom line, the audience’s takeaway must surely have been, “guilty as charged”, and then some.

He has since been forced to resign, while not found guilty of being involved in anything illegal. Quite a price to pay for a politician who, after all, by definition wants only one thing – to stay in office. Well, and in his and some others’ cases, maybe to get rich at the same time. I hope it was worth it financially, Siggy.

So what exactly are these people who have now been “named and shamed” – and there will be many more to come for sure – implicated in, we ask ourselves.

Let me state clearly at the outset that the presumption of innocence must prevail in all these 214,000 cases. And that it’s early days.

In a nutshell, the name of the game is seeking to pay as little taxes as possible, if any – legally (which we all do) or otherwise (which we shouldn’t). Not a lawyer, I assume this is the difference between “tax avoidance” and “tax evasion”.

For forty years, it now transpires, Mossack Fonseca have set up local legal entities for their clients, and they claim there was nothing questionable about what they did. After all, if you wanted to start a company in Panama, what could possibly be wrong with that? Once the business was incorporated, they say, it was not for them to monitor what people used it for. In fact, Mossack Fonseca are quite upset about the fact their computer systems have obviously been hacked – which in most countries, including Panama, is indeed an illegal act.

Remember the grief the FBI had with Apple in the United States when they merely asked to be given access to the iPhone account of the dead jihadist killer couple in California?

The location at the centre of the unfolding sensation is, of course, no coincidence as it is one of those low-tax countries, aka “tax havens” that make a considerable amount of their GDP by attracting capital, honestly earned or ill-gotten (in which case we might even be talking money laundering), no questions asked, to protect it from the respective national equivalent of the U.S. Inland Revenue Service (IRS), the unofficial world champion of tax collection, in its country of origin.

It has to be said, these oases are getting fewer and fewer year-by-year, and most of the surviving ones are nowadays indeed located in the Caribbean (the British Virgin Islands are a particular hot spot, pun fully intended) and Central America.

“Sunny places for shady characters”, as someone once admirably put it.

Of course, “Panama” has certain connotations about it that make it sexier than, say, Liechtenstein (who got their act together years ago I believe). For one, the climate is so much warmer, the vegetation so much lusher, and the resulting ambience so much more exotic. Then, the Canal dissecting it to enable ships to cross from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean without having to go to the trouble and expense involved in rounding Cape Hoorn gives it an irresistible aura of adventure.

Fun facts: It takes ships a mere six to eight hours to pass through the 77 kilometres or 48 miles of the Panama Canal. And in 1994, the renowned American Society of Civil Engineers named it one of “The Seven Wonders of the Modern World” when paying tribute to the "greatest civil engineering achievements of the 20th century".

The other six, since I know you will ask yourself, are, in alphabetical order: the Channel Tunnel linking Great Britain and France (as in, the Continent of Europe); the CN Tower in Toronto; the Empire State Building in New York City; the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco; the Itaipu Dam on the Paraná River between Brazil and Paraguay; and the Zuiderzee Works in The Netherlands.

Of which, to me, the first is the most significant by far as it has turned invalid a geographical and geopolitical constant of European history across the millennia – Great Britain being an island nation last invaded in 1066. And yes, I do know there are enough explosives buried in the Tunnel construction to blow it up if the national security of my chosen host country was ever threatened, which I have to point out is more than just unlikely as one of the lasting achievements of the process since 1945 towards today’s European Union that we so easily criticise, ridicule, and maybe even reject, has been the end to intra-European warfare.

For every generation since earliest days of recorded history, continental Europeans would proceed to bash one another’s heads in, and the British would sooner or later somehow be drawn into that mess. As were the Americans twice in one generation last century, which is why they were the most eager and serious guarantors of the post-WW2 order – The New Old World, as one knowledgeable historian has aptly called it.

No more. France and Germany killing each other is a ridiculous thought nowadays, and “Europe” has a lot to be thanked for.

Then, in addition, there’s this theory that I think holds, according to which democracies don’t wage war on each other. A blissful double whammy for the Old World. Now The New Old World.

This is one of the things the supporters of Brexit don’t get – the sentimental attachment continental Europeans have to the European Union, a sense of gratitude and affection almost, no matter how critical they may otherwise rightfully be of the expensive, vacuous, and often simply quite useless bureaucratic monster it has become. It’s like putting up with the foibles of an at times annoying member of the family because everybody knows it’s him or her who is holding it all together.

Coming back to “The Seven Wonders of the Modern World”, our own Clifton Suspension Bridge is out of scope as famously completed in 1864 – otherwise, its inclusion in any such list would be a no-brainer of course.

By way of a reminder, and just to rub it in:

The Golden Gate Bridge was opened in 1937. Really? Is that all you’ve got? Case closed.

Meanwhile, back in Central America, finally, as a crossroads of the globalised world, Panama City, where half of the country’s population of 3.4 million live, has been the scene for a number of works of fiction about, let’s call them, “facilitators” like our very busy lawyers at Mossack Fonseca.

I mean, just do the math: 214,000 incorporations in 40 years. That’s 5,350 a year, 15 a day, or two per hour. Without closing down for holidays ever.

So many tax evaders (or avoiders?), so little time!

A very good read is John le Carré’s novel, The Tailor of Panama (1996) which was turned into an entertaining film in 2001, directed by John Boorman and starring Pierce Brosnan as Andy Osnard, a disgraced spy, and Geoffrey Rush as emigré English tailor Harry Pendel.

I do have a weak spot for John le Carré, born in 1931 as David John Moore Cornwell, and his mastery of the English language. During the 1950s and the 1960s, he worked for the UK Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service, and began writing novels under a pen name. His third book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) became an international best-seller and remains one of his most famous works. Following its success, he left MI6 to become a full-time author, establishing himself as a leading writer of espionage fiction.

My second-favourite “classic” in his oeuvre is probably Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974). The film of the same title was released in 2011, directed by Tomas Alfredson and starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley, le Carré’s signature character.

Having successfully made the thematic transition from the “good old days” of the Cold War to the more complex conflicts of the contemporary world (alliteration, anyone?), among his more recent books, the following are well worth reading (and they also have been adapted into movies):

The Constant Gardener (2001). The film of 2005 was directed by Fernando Meirelles, with Ralph Fiennes as widower Justin Quayle who is determined to get to the bottom of a potentially explosive secret involving his wife Tessa’s (Rachel Weisz) murder, big business, and corporate corruption. Set in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, the poverty there so affected the film crew that they established the Constant Gardener Trust to provide basic education to those areas (John le Carré is a patron of the charity).

A Most Wanted Man (2008). This novel, set in Hamburg where the author was once a British agent and consul, is based on the contemporary issues of the international war on terror, money laundering (theme!), and the conflicting interests of different officers and agents and amateurs who are involved and impacted, each with their own vested interests, and therefore not necessarily collaborating. Let’s not forget by way of a backdrop that the core of the 9/11 terrorists had been holed up in Hamburg for a while before their attack on the U.S. – The movie adaptation of 2014 was directed by Anton Corbijn and starred the great Philip Seymour Hoffman (1967 – 2014) in one of his very last performances. That in itself makes it a must-see.

Finally, Our Kind of Traitor (2010). This one is about a Russian money launderer (theme!) seeking to defect to the UK after a close friend of his has been killed by the new leadership of his own criminal brotherhood. The English couple who befriend him during a holiday in Antigua are soon caught between the Russian Mafia and the British Secret Service, the proverbial “rock and a hard place”, neither of whom they can trust. Antigua? Right: another “sunny place for shady characters”. – The upcoming 2016 film of the same title as the novel, to be released in the UK on 13 May, is directed by Susanna White and stars Ewan Mc Gregor. Hold the date. The book is a cracker.

Returning to “Canal City”, the home of that now world-famous law firm, finally, of course, there’s the Panama hat.

I wonder if our new acquaintances, Messrs Mossack and Fonseca, to us now just Jürgen and Ramón, wear one on their way to and from work every day. Busy as they are setting up shell firms, I’m sure they don’t have time to go out for lunch.

So, finally coming back to the question at the beginning of these musings – apart from the sheer dimensions of the “Panamanian Connection” and short of whatever disclosures may still spring from it, is this all something to be so surprised about? Russian oligarchs, FIFA officials, and the regime in North Korea are corrupt? Really? Who would have thought. Duh.

Leaving legality, morality, and ethics aside for a moment, and maybe we can’t, why would human beings – athletes as much as billionaires – not yield to temptation, especially since, like any petty shoplifter, they will always assume to be the one that will not get caught?

Harking back all the way to the Old Testament and the Garden of Eden, Humanity has, if anything, been unfailingly reliable in its unreliability, constant in its fickleness, and strong in its weakness:

“When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.” Genesis 3:6. (The Holy Bible, New International Version)

In the words of much more recent members of our race, and not the most stupid or least eloquent ones either:

“There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.” Mark Twain, American author (1835 – 1910)

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” Oscar Wilde, Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet (1854 – 1900)

“I generally avoid temptation until I can’t resist it.” Mae West, American actress, singer, playwright, screenwriter, and “sex symbol” (1893 – 1980)

Ms West is one of my all-time favourites, not just as a Queen of the Silver Screen, but as the author of many very witty quips, aphorisms, and double-entendres.

Here’s my top three (but as with Yogi Berra, it’s a very hard choice to make, so please indulge me as I go for four):

“Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?”

“Young men don’t know what they are doing, but they do it all night long.”

“Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”

The best ever: “I have to get out of these wet clothes and into a dry Martini.”

One of the more controversial movie stars of her day, Ms West encountered many problems. Asked about the various efforts to impede her success, she replied: "I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it."

Hollywood doesn’t make them like Mae West anymore. And the world is a poorer place for it.

Like many others who were misunderstood, criticised, or even persecuted in their day, she found refuge in Humour – which, the older I get, the more I find conquers all.

And yes, still a romantic at heart, I would concede so does Love, occasionally, if you get lucky. For it first to strike and then to survive, however, in my experience, a compatible sense of humour is a must-have.

So maybe this is how we should address the revelations, disclosures, and scandals of these past few days – by not taking them nor ourselves too seriously. Probably it’s the only way to navigate the currents of life anyway. After all: “When humour goes, there goes civilization.” Erma Bombeck, American author and humourist (1927 – 1996)

“If I had no sense of humour, I would long ago have committed suicide.” Mahatma Gandhi (1869 – 1948)

“Humour is mankind's greatest blessing.” Mark Twain (1835 – 1910; again – and not by coincidence)

In German, we have a saying: “Humour is when you laugh regardless.”

So, where does all this leave us?

Definitely undecided I guess. We don’t like cheats, but we do understand from our own personal lives the concept of temptation and are familiar with the experience of yielding to it.

But hopefully also with the confidence of knowing that whatever this wondrous existence, this crazy world, and its strange inhabitants may throw at us, we will do better than just muddling through – we will actually find our way.

Never forget the wisdom of Yogi Berra: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

And to leave the last word to the late great Mae West:

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”