Luke Harding, a bastion of ethical journalism (and not at all a paranoid lunatic), has churned out 2 articles totaling over 5000 words, each using the word "Putin", almost as often as they use the phrases "allegedly", "speculation suggests", "has been described as" and "may have been".
Neither of his articles mentions by name any of the 12 world leaders, past and present, actually identified in the documents, nor do they mention David Cameron's dad, who is also in there. No, they focus on a cellist friend of Putin's, talk about his daughter's marriage, and include an awful lot of diagrams with big arrows that point at pictures of...Vladimir Putin. This is, apparently, all evidence of...something.
...I'm not sure what, but it will probably be discussed at length in the "book" Luke Harding is probably planning to publish in a couple of weeks. That's if the NSA don't delete it all while he's typing.
The only important, or even true, phrase Harding uses appears at the very top of this article:
...the president's name does not appear in any of the records...That's a minor detail of course, I mean, they have a video: "How to hide $1 billion". The title screen is, you guessed it, a photo of Putin. Presumably because he is SO GOOD at hiding his billions that, unlike Petro Poroshenko and David Cameron's dad:
...the president's name does not appear in any of the records...So there you go. The Guardian falls into self parody, pasting up a massive picture, a misleading headline and 5000 words (that Harding presumably copied from someone else), at the merest suggestion of a tenuous connection to the Russian president.
It's a bit odd, really.
This is exactly WHY I - and many others - questioned SOTT's apparently first link re Panama Papers - with a "Partners in Crime" picture* at [ [Link] ] when from the start (given the targets)
In same (focused on Iceland P.M. because they were only ones to punish bankers) the cui bono aspect appeared so strong (it's stronger now) that it had to be a 'leak' created by The West, and which reLIED on asses like the authors of that article and this one too, both from the Guardian disinformation Series on The painfully obvious PTB-created "Panama Papers" Scandal (sic.)
R.C.
* Subsequently corrected by SOTT.
RC