Washington: For wealthy Americans trying to conceal their cash, stashing millions of dollars away in secret offshore shell companies is not as simple as it used to be.

International laws, whistleblower bounties and embarrassing data breaches such as the one being dubbed the Panama Papers have made the lives of would-be US tax cheats increasingly perilous, according to tax lawyers and former government prosecutors and investigators.

“If you are someone with serious money and you want to hide it from the government, you have a good reason to be nervous,” said Daniel Reeves, who founded the offshore compliance division of the Internal Revenue Service and now works as a tax compliance consultant.

“Today, there are many different ways people can find out about your activities. It’s not the same world of secrecy.”

Reeves and other offshore experts say they are not surprised by the paucity of Americans in the massive data leak of 11.5 million records that has unmasked accounts belonging to world leaders and a rogues gallery of international criminals.

Panama, the base of operations for the law firm at the centre of the unfolding financial scandal, has never been a favourite place for Americans to hide their money.

The nation’s reputation for bank fraud and drug smuggling has prompted US citizens to send their money to more stable shores and nations, including the Isle of Man, the Cayman Islands and Switzerland, according to the offshore experts.

One of the founders of the Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca & Co., had another explanation for the dearth of US names in the data leak. He and his business partner have never courted US clients.

“My partner is German, and I lived in Europe, and our focus has always been the European and Latin American market,” Ramon Fonseca told the Daily Mail in London on Thursday.

Mossack Fonseca said in a statement issued to The Washington Post that the firm has not violated the law.

“Nothing in this illegally obtained cache of documents suggests we’ve done anything wrong or illegal, and that’s very much in keeping with the global reputation we’ve worked hard to build over the past 40 years of doing business the right way,” the company said in its statement.

The massive data leak from Mossack Fonseca has revealed the existence of 214,488 secret offshore entities, based on financial spreadsheets, copies of passports, emails and corporate records from 1977 to 2015.

The leak to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has prompted the president of Iceland to tender his resignation and forced British Prime Minister David Cameron to acknowledge that he financially benefited from shares in an offshore account set up by his father.

The embarrassing revelations have not touched prominent US citizens, corporate executives or politicians.

The Washington Post does not have access to the documents, but the McClatchy group of newspapers and Fusion, a Miami-based cable station, have been poring over the records as the US partners in the international reporting consortium.

They have uncovered 211 scanned US passports and about 3,500 shareholders in offshore accounts with US addresses.

On Thursday, McClatchy reported that a Hollywood mogul, a Hyatt hotel heiress and a relative of a family that founded the Campbell Soup Company appear in the Mossack Fonseca documents. The individuals denied wrongdoing and said the accounts were created in accordance with US law.

Offshore experts said they doubt that many prominent US citizens and politicians will turn up in the data.

“US politicians are smart enough not to get involved in this kind of thing because they know the exposure would be the end of their careers,” said Jack Blum, a veteran US Senate investigator who has spent his career examining the offshore world.

“If Americans are going to take their money offshore, they’re probably not going to use this firm and instead go to companies and countries that are far safer.”

Bloomberg-The Washington Post Service

Published in Dawn, April 10th, 2016