ML-Implode News - Why Juncker should worry about Panama Papers' Lux-links

Juncker, who, lest anyone had forgotten, was finance minister of Luxembourg for a mere 20 years, from July 1989 to 2009, and (overlapping) prime minister from January 1995 to December 2013. In other words, for nearly a quarter of a century he played a leading role in the establishment and defense of Luxembourg as a center of financial services... What would worry me, if I was an adviser to Juncker, is the frequency with which Luxembourg is cropping up in the individual controversies. For instance, the transaction that seemed to have done for Iceland's DavÃÃ° was that his wife bought a company, Wintris, registered in the British Virgin Islands. She bought it from Mossack Fonseca using a Luxembourgish bank. Sweden's financial supervisor has announced that it will be investigating Nordea, a big Nordic bank, whose Luxembourg branch, according to the Panama Papers, had set up more than 400 offshore companies for its clients.
Or again, consider the embarrassment in Belgium, where the Panama Papers show that Dexia was helping clients to avoid tax by using Panamanian shell companies. The Franco-Belgian bank was in such difficulties during the financial crisis of 2008 that it was given Belgian state assistance of â‚¬6 billion plus various state-backed guarantees. But that was not enough to save it: The Belgian state had to intervene again with billions of euro in taxpayers' money in 2011, buying out the Belgian part and creating what is now Belfius. Yet the Panama Papers show that in 2008-09 this state-funded bank, chaired after its bailout by a former prime minister, the late Jean-Luc Dehaene, was helping its clients to avoid tax through its Luxembourg subsidiary Dexia-BIL.

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Why Juncker should worry about Panama Papers' Lux-links