by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group
The "Panama Papers" calls into question some of our basic ideas about how money is earned, saved, invested and spent. The belief so far is that the world is guided by rules, and, if there are deviations, they must be exceptions. Non-disclosure of funds held in clandestine accounts abroad, when revealed, can be explosive. So was it in the last decade when Lehman Brothers, the US bank, was found falsely claiming that its books were in the pink of health by having "sold" its sub-prime housing debts, known as "toxic" debts, to offshore companies in Cayman Island, a tax haven. As its lie was detected, it came clattering down, and the worldwide recession of 2008 began.
