"Thousands of prosecutions could stem from the Panama Papers, if only law enforcement could access and evaluate the actual documents. ICIJ documents from the Panama Papers. They chose not to cover them. The sad truth is that among the most prominent and capable media organisations in the world there was not a single one interested in reporting on the story. Even Wikileaks didn't answer its tip line repeatedly."

With constant illegal government snooping on calls and emails now accepted as an established fact in Western countries, it is impossible for anyone to go to the press with a damaging story without the surveillance people of some state or other - and especially the US - knowing about it. The US Government therefore knew that John Doe was hawking his wares around the news agencies. Add this to the fact that politicians are by far the most referred-to type of people in the papers (perhaps one-third of them, far ahead of actors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, film producers, businessmen and people involved in football) but American politicians hardly receive a mention, and an interesting possibility arises: is the leak the work of the US Central Intelligence Agency?

When the story first hit the headlines Ramon Fonseca, a founder of the Panamanian law firm, said that he believed the leak to come from an attack by external hackers, adding bitterly: "The world is already accepting that privacy is not a human right." His co-founder, Jürgen Mossack, is the son of a Nazi SS officer.

The worth of the Panama Papers to the US is evident: with so many offshore tax havens - especially the British Virgin Islands and Panama - being discredited, America's own onshore-offshore centres such as Delaware and Las Vegas are attracting a tidal wave of money from high-net-worth individuals from overseas. The papers' worth to governments the world over, embarrassed as they may be today, is also evident: revelations such as these could be used to justify more surveillance, more government involvement in financial firms, and ultimately more compliance activity.