The Pandora Papers’ offshore accounts aren’t for evading taxes. They’re for evading laws altogether.

For those who can afford it, Offshore has it all. In fact, the protection of wealthy individuals and their property is often better than what they can get on land: more secrecy and more legal firewalls between their assets and anyone who wants something from them. And if an offshore jurisdiction doesn’t have the exact combination of laws that suits your needs, you can order bespoke laws to change that. Several of the asset managers I interviewed boasted that they were making bespoke laws for their clients – tax havens invited them to submit those legislative proposals and put them into law immediately. The professionals I studied helped their clients save themselves all kinds of obligations with the skillful use of the offshore system. An asset manager told me about a client who took out a half-million dollar loan from an American bank and deposited it into an asset protection trust in the Cook Islands – a structure that was not aimed at avoiding taxes but rather at frustrating creditors – and never paid back a cent. The small South Pacific nation is known as “A Paradise of Untouchable Goods” for good reason. For those who can afford it, its special trust laws allow some form of legalized theft. The same structure was used by the late American financier Marc Rich to store the enormous fortune made by violating US trade sanctions against Iran; all the power of the United States government has failed to seize these assets, and his ex-wife Denise is still receiving the income they generate by running several luxury residences and a yacht. Offshore allows selective impunity as the ultimate power trip. Taxes are the most famous obligation to avoid, but as the Pandora Papers show, the possibilities are much greater. As Joan Didion wrote more than 50 years ago, “The secret point of money and power … is not the things money can buy, nor power for the sake of power … but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.” Even kings (and queens, as we saw when Elizabeth II of England appeared in the Paradise Papers) obviously long for this escape from rules and accountability.