Washington, April 8

From Russia to China, and Britain to Iceland, the revelations of the “Panama Papers” have tarnished officials and the wealthy over the implication that they hide riches offshore.

But one group is not there: prominent Americans. US tycoons and politicians are notably absent in the leaked files of the Panama law offices of Mossack Fonseca, which created thousands of shell companies worldwide to hide the identities of their ultimate owners, some of whom may have been evading taxes.

There is Hollywood mogul David Geffen, the Asylum Records and Dreamworks SKG co-founder. But there are no Americans comparable to Iceland’s prime minister, or henchmen of the Russian president -- all in the Panama records -- at least in what has been disclosed so far.

“There are a lot of Americans, but they are more like private citizens,” said Marina Walker Guevara, deputy director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists which coordinated the investigation and release of the Panama Papers.

However, that hardly means Americans have fully embraced financial transparency, she told AFP.

“It doesn’t show that the US is outside of the offshore system; the US is actually a big player.”

One possible reason for their small presence in the Panama documents is that US citizens hoping to hide funds and activities offshore were not drawn to Spanish-speaking Panama as a haven, when there are options like the British Virgin islands and the Cayman Islands.

“Americans have so many tax havens to choose from,” said Nicholas Shaxson, author of “Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World,” a 2011 book on secretive centres for hiding money.

Indeed, Americans do not have to go abroad to hide funds and activities behind anonymous corporations: they can create them at home.

States like Delaware and Wyoming allow the creation of such companies, for just a few hundred dollars, that conceal their ultimate financial beneficiary.

And while US banks are normally required to “know their customers,” they can bypass that rule and open accounts for shell companies, ensuring total discretion for someone who wants to move money around quietly.

The US Treasury is moving to stop the practice, which can be used by arms and drug traffickers to launder funds and lands the United States in third in the Tax Justice Network’s ranking of the world’s least transparent countries, well above Panama.

The Treasury is moving to plug that loophole, however. “We’re in the last stages of drafting the final rule,” a Treasury official told AFP.