A Dublin court has sent three former senior banking executives to jail for committing "sham transactions" in an effort to deceive customers and shareholders during the 2008 financial crisis."The trio will be among the first senior bankers globally to be jailed for their role in the collapse of a bank during the crisis," as Reuters reports. [...]

Legal double standards are the norm in the U.S. – no jail for law-flouting Wall Street bankers but mass incarceration for average citizens, especially minorities, who get caught up in the prison-industrial-complex, as Michael Brenner describes. Illicit financial behavior has been decriminalized in the United States – for all practical purposes. [...]

The anonymous source behind the Panama Papers stepped out of the shadows on Friday to offer justification for what has been called the biggest leak in history. The whistleblower's gender and name remain secret, as does their occupation. [...]

The Romanian hacker who claims to have breached Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server says he spoke with an FBI agent. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) – Romanian hacker Guccifer who claims to have breached Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server says he spoke with an agent from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) while being extradited to the United States. [...]

Former Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was sentenced to 15 months in prison on Wednesday after a judge referred to him as a “serial child molester,” making him one of the highest-ranking politicians in US history to go to prison. Hastert, 74, pleaded guilty last year to paying $3.5 million in hush-money to a man to keep the molestation secret. [...]

Panama was basically carved off from Colombia in order to have a canal. It was created very much like Liberia. It’s not really a country in the sense that a country has its own currency and its own tax system. Panama uses U.S. dollars. So does Liberia. [...]

British Prime Minister David Cameron is facing increasing calls to resign in the wake of revelations that he had profited from offshore tax havens and personally intervened to prevent a crackdown on tax evasion in the United Kingdom. [...]

The United States have been professing to be fighting tax evasion all over the world, but at the same time, it’s opened up tax havens at home: in Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming and South Dakota, says journalist Ernst Wolff. Why would people move their offshore money to a relatively high-tax regime in the United States rather than say Ireland or Luxembourg? [...]

The British government’s claim to be tackling tax evasion is about as credible as Al Capone claiming to be leading the fight against organized crime. In fact, Britain is at the heart of the global tax haven network, and continues to lead the fight against its regulation. The 11 and a half million leaked documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca have proven, once again, [...]

US officials, always sensitive to anti-American leaks and harsh to whistleblowers, now appear unconcerned about how the Panama Papers came to light. Grilled by reporters, the State Department could not tell if the US-funded leak was actually data theft or not. [...]

The media hype has focused on Vladimir Putin (who was actually not named) and David Cameron (who wasn't either). However, the biggest loser from the Panama Paper’s fallout just might be Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko. [...]