I'm kind of torn on this. On the one hand, I appreciate that they're not trying to hurt the little guys, the people who are just trying to get by in the world and use these offshore accounts quasi-legitimately the way kleinbl00 describes and argues how they're supposed to be used. On the other hand though, I feel like if you knowingly hide from the law and are aware of potential consequences, you should face them if they come your way. Then again, some laws are stupid and if you get overly technical and nitpicky about them, pretty much everyone breaks a law sooner or later. If I bought a pack of cigarettes and crossed state lines with them, then technically I'm breaking a tax law. That's of course significantly less severe than having an off shore account, but then again, who gets to decide severity?The German newspaper that first obtained the so-called Panama Papers, a vast trove of documents on offshore companies, said Thursday that it won't publish all the files, arguing that not all are of public interest.
In the US at least, case law. Libel and slander laws break the citizenry up into three categories: private figures, public figures and limited-purpose public figures. A private figure is someone you wouldn't know about because they've done nothing newsworthy. A public figure is someone who has an occupation that puts them in the public eye - politicians, celebrities, journalists, professional athletes and the like are all public figures under the law. A limited-purpose public figure is where things get a little itchy particularly with the Internet - a limited-purpose public figure is a private individual who has done something newsworthy and therefore can be reasonably covered and investigated by journalists without running afoul of libel and slander laws. That "chocolate rain" dude is a limited-purpose public figure. The guy who took an Instagram shot with the Egyptian hijacker. Gawker has pissed off journalists and citizens alike by determining that their news coverage defines limited-purpose public figures - like that CFO you never heard of that they outted as gay because... they're Gawker. Reddit, for their part, issued a missive from their legal team after Gawker outted violentacrez, basically informing every moderator on their site that simply by being a moderator, they became limited-purpose public figures and that Reddit wouldn't lift a finger to protect them in future instances where their actions as moderators brought them into the public eye. I'm not sure what case law elsewhere in the world is, but as far as I know most countries basically dance around these same issues. It mostly boils down to "you can't write stuff about a large group of citizens just because you happen to have information on them." If they've broken the law, sure - but that's not the argument here. The argument is that they've been creative (legally creative) with their taxes. It's like the Ashley Madison leak - nobody broke the law there, so when the data leaked, it launched a half-billion dollar class action lawsuit. SZ isn't stupid. They know that they get to keep leaking so long as they keep acting like journalists, rather than tabloid scumbags. That means public figures only.
That's actually really comforting to hear. There are so many ways people can get burned in their lives by making small mistakes, innocent or not, and to see that they have some measure of protection from fallout is reassuring. That said, aren't offshore accounts technically tax evasions? Isn't that very behavior illegal?
Tax evasion, in the US, is officially tax fraud - as far as I know, you can't be charged with "evasion." So long as you don't falsify any documents (the definition of fraud), you aren't evading taxes, you're sheltering money. It's really easy to shelter money.