‘Ottawa’ Panama Papers Could Impact Divorce Settlements: Lawyer
Forget diamonds. The Panama Papers could be a scorned ex-wife’s best friend.
With confidential banking details of more than 200,000 offshore companies — including the names of at least 625 Canadians — expected to be made public Monday, a Mississauga-based tax lawyer suggests the information dump may spark shafted divorcees to re-open their settlement cases.
Paul DioGuardi, who has been practising tax law for 50 years, said Sunday some people hide money offshore in a trust while they’re going through a divorce and they don’t report their assets.
“Put yourself in the shoes of an aggrieved spouse,” he said. “The ladies may be getting a bad shake. Say, you’re married to a well-to-do businessman and you expect to get a great settlement and the little rat has hidden $1 million offshore and hasn’t told you. So all of a sudden, his name comes up tomorrow and the first thing you do is call your divorce lawyer and re-open the case because he lied.”
According to the CBC which — along with the Toronto Star — has exclusive access in Canada to the leaked names from Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca, the 2.6 terabytes of information will be released online Monday at 2 p.m.
“It’s going to depend on what these people have done,” DioGuardi said. “You can’t just say because there’s a leak of names that everything is wrong. Then the question is how does a tax lawyer fix it in the best possible way.”
For the law-abiding Canadian taxpayers, DioGuardi said the people with money offshore are partially responsible for the housing bubble in Toronto and Vancouver. And that’s what they should be most outraged over.
“We don’t even know where the money comes from. It could be dirty money, it could be drug money, it could be anything,” he said. “The Canadian government is basically letting itself be a washing machine for money. This is where Canadians are being hurt by offshore. You don’t have to stop people from investing here, what you do is tax them.”
When the names are revealed, DioGuardi doesn’t doubt there will be more resignations and the Canada Revenue Agency will exercise its iron first and prosecute. But, these prosecutions drag on for years.
“I think among all these names, there might be some they’d want to prosecute in order to set an example, but it depends on what it is,” he said. “When I started practising, it was very easy to keep secrets. But with the Internet, everything’s changed. We’re going to have (similar situations as Panama Papers) happen more and more.”
Controversies flowing from the Panama Papers:
•The papers revealed a number of offshore companies owned by close associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin. They suggest the companies may have been used for up to $2 billion in money laundering, which he vehemently denies.
•Iceland’s former prime minister, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, resigned after the leaked documents showed he and his wife secretly owned an offshore firm that sheltered dollars in Icelandic bank bonds while the country was in financial turmoil.
•The prime minister of Pakistan, the king of Saudi Arabia and the children of the president of Azerbaijan all had links to offshore companies. There were also ties to China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, as well as Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
•Celebrities such as Simon Cowell, movie star Jackie Chan and Paul McCartney’s ex-wife Heather Mills were named in the Panama Papers leak to the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. •There were reports of offshore dealings by the late father of British Prime Minister David Cameron, who has pushed for tax-haven reform.
jyuen@postmedia.com