2025-01-07
24 分钟Hi, I'm Atusa Araxia Abrahamian, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times.
If you've ever bought a bottle of scotch at the duty free store at the airport,
or admired a da Vinci painting on the walls of a museum,
or even gone on a cruise and noticed that the flag that the ship is flying is of Panama, Liberia,
or the Marshall Islands, you've had firsthand contact with the offshore world,
the whole hidden world hiding in plain sight.
I became familiar with this world from growing up in Geneva, Switzerland,
in this international community of expats and diplomats and UN workers
and people who worked at sister agencies to the un.
And my classmates were the children of these people.
I saw kids get out of trouble because their dad's car had a diplomatic license plate.
Even if they were speeding, they didn't pay the fine.
So growing up,
I had this perception that there was another way of doing things and
that the rules didn't fully apply to everyone.
And that's how I became interested in this world.
Above, beneath, and between nations.
When you think about the offshore world,
your mind might go to something like the Panama Papers or the Paradise Papers,
all of those leaks that show the ways