(Image: Gorkie/Private Media)

What do King Abdullah II of Jordan, an orange juice mogul, and Australian Gold Coast developer Jim Rapti have in common?

It sounds like the start of a joke, but it’s not. Because the answer is that all of them have been revealed by the Pandora Papers as offshoring hidden assets using shell companies or secretive trust structures.

There has been much defensive quibbling about the lawfulness of the financial accumulation, and the complex and secretive financial practices and institutions used to conceal it, some of them pioneered and based in South Dakota, and other US states. As if the fact that enough state or federal politicians agreed to pass a law says a thing — anything at all — about whether the provisions of the law are moral.

As one South Dakota politician noted when the time came to pass the revisions to the law authored by the same people who conceived and wrote them in the first place – men like “wealth creation” lawyer Jonathan Blattmachr – “we don’t even understand them.”

Hardly a moral stamp of approval.

The same moral disgust can rightly be felt for those who stash their cash in this way. I mean, why go to the trouble or expense if you’ve got nothing to hide? In fact, the Pandora Papers read like a compendium of dodgy dealings, like Putin’s desire to shield the luxury mansion bought for his mistress.

Or take, for instance, King Abdullah’s quest to avoid scrutiny from the United States, that gave Jordan $1.5 billion of aid in 2020 — his own citizens who are struggling financially may like to know where the cash for the King’s property splash comes from.

Then you have a Colombian textile magnate trying to launder money for an international drug ring, and an Australian businessman who was never pursued personally by creditors after a business collapse because he lacked assets, until they were revealed in a superannuation account in the tax haven of Samoa.

If it sounds dodgy, that’s because it is, the lawfulness or otherwise of these arrangements notwithstanding. Though the law does matter, mostly because most of us follow it and use it as a floor below which no decent human should go.

By validating the secretive, free-rider tendencies of the hyper-rich and powerful chronicled in the Pandora Papers, the race to the bottom for the standards by which we can hold others to account got a little faster.