Panama City. CC BY
dronepicr / Flickr. Some rights reserved.In the past month, the Panama Papers have dragged a number of Eurasia’s oligarchic networks out of the shadows and into the arena of public scrutiny. The leaked documents reveal that Central Asian elites and businesses are embedded in a highly globalised system of shell companies and offshore intermediaries.
This argument is not new. As Alexander Cooley and John Heathershaw explained in a recent academic paper, these revelations contradict long-held western assumptions about Central Asia as a peripheral region disconnected from the global economy. Rather than operating in isolation, the region’s elites have been quietly deploying the same lexicon and sophisticated practices as financial actors looking to dodge taxes.
