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Jake Bernstein Biography

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“After his meeting with Romney, Fonesca encountered Keith Flax, a local jeweler who was also speaker of the legislative council and a close friend of both Romney and Peters. It didn't take long for the Panamanian and the Belonger to recognize they shared a special bond. Both were members of the ancient order of Freemasons. Dating to the Industrial Revolution in England, Freemasonry appropriated the symbols of craft guilds like the stonemasons to forge a fraternal order kept alive through esoteric rituals and Masonic lodges. ¶ Fonseca had tapped into an underground network—a secret society within a secret society—that exists in tax havens, particularly the British ones. Knowledge of Freemasonry, its signs, symbols, and rites, often serves as a doorway into closed cultures. It provides instant solidarity and an opportunity for government and business interests to network privately. John Christensen [the Jersey island exposé cooperator] says he was approached multiple times on Jersey to join one lodge or another. He always declined the offer. Holding no particular animus toward Freemasonry or the elite hobnobbing in the lodges, Christensen nonetheless viewed it all as slightly creepy.”

Freemasons
Book:Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite
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“Mossfon subscribed to a Google-like paid search service called World-Check to help identify PEPs ["politically exposed person"] and criminals. It also, not for the first time, sent a letter to its professional clients requesting that they conduct a customer review. There was little follow-up. It was a question of incentives. When scandals sporadically came to light, they always seemed to resolve themselves without undue harm to the firm. Meanwhile, business was booming. In 2005, the firm tripled the number of shell companies it created on behalf of banks. By the end of the year, Mossfon had more than seventy thousand active companies. To do the necessary due diligence on all of them would have been prohibitively expensive, and sometimes impossible. In a business predicated on secrecy, no one wanted to produce the information.”

BoredomScandalDue DiligenceIllicit
Book:Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite
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