Offshoring and Other Magic Tricks of Global Finance: An Interview with RYBN

Introduction by Max Gorynski. Interview by Nika Mahnič

A data visualisation of all of the nations implicated in the offshoring accounts disclosed by the Panama Papers, and their relations to one another.

From Panama to Paradise to the Bahamas and back, touching upon everywhere between in heaven and in hell (yes, even Delaware), there are few shores around the world that have yet to, in some way, be made an offshore.

It’s an idea that has come to gain considerable weight in the public imagination in the last decade, financial offshoring. The phenomenon is a fundamental bell-weather of increasing globalization. As global markets open up more and more, year-on-year, more businesses are choosing to relocate aspects of their operations, including accounting, to other, more permissive regions of the world.

Offshoring is not, of course, simply a question of canny business strategy. The Mossack-Fonseca affair in 2016 brought the illegal utilities of offshoring — which begin with simple fraud and proceed through tax evasion, international sanction avoidance, corruption, and worse — to wide attention. The unethical dimensions of the practice of offshoring have been subject to intense scrutiny not only by cadres of journalists and academics, but by the public at large as well, at least in the West. This is true particularly since large swathes of ordinary taxpayers, who’ve seen domestic…