Operation Just Cause – By the Fourth Estate

There was nothing much happening around the world to inspire the dilettante writer in me pen a blog. The prime time and headlines on the national front were dominated by mundane uninteresting debates and editorials on beef, booze, dress, and general calls to Freedom of everything, from or within, dominated by the right to speech and the right to eat. The International news was once again all about the gory face of hatred showing up everywhere.

Actually I missed the good old days when the prime times were intellectually engaging. They used to debate on technical stuff like Spectrum licenses, 2G’s, 3G’s, large sized Howitzers, Submarines , Helicopters, Mining licenses and the ways to get them etc. , and yes there were the occasional fodder talk too. Well, when there is a lot of bullshit happening all around we need to talk about fodder too, isn’t it? But, we did learn a lot, in fact I had learnt how a spectrum works even before the 3G’s and 4G’s popped up on my smart phone screen.

So you see there was nothing inspirational to write about, until the mother of all breaking news beamed and flashed across the world a couple of days ago. The Panama Papers they called it. Apparently spilling the beans (or more than beans) on the rich and the famous from across the globe. This was a rarity in the media world, news breaking across time zones with enough local content to keep the viewers / readers hooked. This was also a moment of voyeuristic pleasure for a middle class citizen to see the riches of the super-rich being hauled up, especially in India since it came close on the heels of a member of the uber–wealthy fraternity giving us the slip a month ago.

Panama, a Central American country that connects the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans has created quite a storm across seas over the last 48 hours. It’s rather ironical that the word Panama also means ‘many butterflies’, quite a lot I would say, now in the tummies across the world. For a change these are tummies filled with Caviar and Chardonnay. My memory connects with Panama in a rather vague couple of things, mugging up its rather easy capital Panama City and marking the Panama Canal on the world map, or wearing a straw hat bought at Mahabalipuram that was sold to me as a Panama hat and the impressive packet of Panama cigarettes that used to feature in old Tamil movies.

With my half-baked knowledge in finance, all I have understood is the rich and famous have managed to stash their wealth away from the eyes of the daft people like you and me who simply believe in paying the taxes before earning them. One article talks about how a husband used these means to hide his wealth from his wife just as their relationship headed south, thereby saving a couple of hundreds of millions of dollars in divorce settlement. There is also an instance where the wife had done the same to protect her wealth. One of the synonyms of wealth is Mammon. How true when you hear all this.

If my wife and I were to part ways I would probably walk away with my leftover Old Monk and she with her bottle of wine. Yes I do stash away my wealth too since the day I started earning, I had the habit of folding a couple of hundreds and ‘stash’ it away in the hidden recesses of my wallet and conveniently forget it, so that, it comes in handy when I’m digging deep into every hidden hole at times of need.

I am no expert in corporate law or personal finance however I feel embittered by the happenings and the sight of astronomical figures doing the rounds. I am not preaching Robin Hood here but my feeling is that even a 3rd or 4th decimal fraction of the figures doing the rounds would go a long way in the process of alleviating poverty across the globe.

The Americans invaded and bombed Panama in 1989, dethroned Gen Manuel Noriega and claimed they were fighting to combat drug trafficking for the world’s sake. They called it Operation Just Cause. Twenty seven years later thanks to the selfless and concerted efforts by a group of 70 odd journalist sharing data across countries and cultures are combating another evil in the society called money laundering.

This time around the operation is for more than a just cause and has gone on to prove that the pen is definitely mightier than the bombs.