The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money by Bastian ObermayerMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Hooter: A case study on how the rich game the system illegally to keep their money .
One of the largest exposes in history so far, turning wikileaks pale in comparison are the Panama Papers. Authored by the key protagonists of the journalistic expose, this book fcouses on their thoughts as they went through these terabytes of data and tried to make sense of it all. The challenges of working with a global team of ICIJ reporters across the globe , dealing with so much data that they had to get a super computer setup to do simple searches - would be a lovely engineering problem to discuss and solve.
The book also focuses on the various names that cropped up and their backgrounds and connects to people of power across party lines sailing on the same boat. Though after a while you get bored - this creation of passion is an overkill for the regular reader because it gets into a format :
Rich person / Powerful person of Country X creates shell for money earned from Y and gets away scot free by dealing with these Panama based law firm Mossack and Fonseca and Compliance gives a blind eye.
This is a brilliant project that had worldwide implications along with the collaboration, this book tries to capture the breadth of it all and becomes a factual report with sprinkling of the drama that ensued. I am left with a lot more questions after reading the book than answers I had hoped to get.
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