THE most depressing thing about the latest financial mega leak, the Paradise Papers, is that it comes as no surprise. The Queen, Bono, obscure TV actors and even, we’re told, jet aeroplanes have been using offshore tax havens like the Caymans to avoid paying tax. It’s what wealthy people do. But there was one significant omission from the offshore list of shame: Scotland.

As readers of this newspaper will be aware, thanks largely to the assiduous reporting of our own Chief Reporter, David Leask, Scotland has for years been helping up to 30,000 Russian oligarchs, money launderers, corrupt dictators and other pillars of the international community to hide their cash by setting up what are called Scottish Limited Partnerships. These vehicles allow anonymous beneficial ownership, and are even marketed abroad as “zero-tax Scottish offshore companies”.

Attempts are now being made to disclose the identities of the anonymous owners of these shell companies. But the fact that this could have happened under the very noses of successive non-Tory Scottish governments shows what a pernicious problem tax avoidance really is. Tax accountants scan the world for loopholes in tax codes to help their wealthy clients stash their ill-gotten gains. Small countries are the big growth area in this business – sometimes because there is regulatory negligence, but more often because governments are only too happy to turn a blind eye.

The classic case is, of course, Switzerland, which built its international banking system on confidentiality rules concealing immense wealth, including that of former Nazis. It has been cleaning up its act. But since the 1980s, governments across the world have been getting in on the same business by allowing wealthy individuals and corporations to hide wealth just so long as they hide it with them. And we’re not just talking about tropical islands. The Republic of Ireland founded its current prosperity on slashing corporate taxes to attract big US companies to the Emerald Isle.

The Irish Government disputes this, but there’s no doubt that over the last two decades the Republic has marketed itself as the premier, English-speaking tax haven, and in the process has attracted over 700 US firms. All the big names in the tech world like Google, Twitter, Facebook now have big investments in Dublin. The EU is not happy and is currently taking the Irish Government to court over its failure to recover $15 billion from Apple alone. In 2014, it has emerged, Apple Sales International paid an effective corporation tax rate of 0.005 per cent.

The Irish Government insists that it has been doing nothing wrong; it’s just a poor country trying to secure a foothold in the global economy. Eastern European countries like Slovakia and Slovenia did much the same. It’s not that long ago that it was official SNP policy to turn Scotland into a kind of tax haven by slashing corporation tax with the aim of turning Scotland into a Celtic Tiger. Your tax avoidance is our tax competition.

Now that the EU is turning up the heat on the Irish Government, tech firms have been looking for other places to hide their cash. The Paradise Papers revealed that in 2015, Apple Operations International, which holds much of the company’s £252bn offshore tax pile, shifted operations to the island of Jersey. It’s a giant corporate shell-game. It has been estimated that around 8 per cent of the world’s wealth, $7-10 trillion, has been hoarded offshore in the greatest scam in the history of capitalism. And Britain is up to its oxters in it.

The necklace of British Crown Dependencies and Territories across the globe is the definitive tax haven network. These are mostly obscure remnants of the British Empire, like the British Virgin Islands, whose wealth is built, not on trade or commerce but on helping people, like the former Prime Minister David Cameron’s father, hide their wealth from the tax man.

There really is no excuse for this. These countries are still effectively under the UK jurisdiction and their dodgy practices could be shut down tomorrow. The UK Government holds back because many British firms, especially in the financial sector, exploit,their lax tax regimes. Big banks like RBS have long used use tax havens to aid their international business dealings.

Banks have been jostling with plutocratic pop stars like Madonna and Bono in the Paradise Papers. Wealthy individuals invariably say, in their defence, that they didn’t understand what their accountants were doing on their behalf, and often this is true. These people have so much wealth – both Bono and Madge are worth over $500m – that they don’t know what to do with it. One suggestion has been to create, not just a blacklist of tax havens, but a blacklist of financial advisers who do the tax avoidance leg work. The European Commission is trying to get to grips with the situation by regulation, and this is an important reason for supporting the EU. It is the only international body with enough clout to clean up the tax havens.

But I think we also need to deal with tax avoidance at source: the anti-social accumulation of vast personal fortunes. Successive governments have allowed rich individuals to harvest the wealth of society, first by cutting taxes and then by offering a thousand ways to avoid them. Like sexual harassment at work, this is a centuries-old abuse of power that simply has to stop, or else the entire tax system will become morally unsustainable.

Non-Tory parties in the Scottish Parliament are now agreed that it is time to increase income taxes. However, the danger is that in attempting to do so without addressing avoidance they will end up only taxing the little people who cannot afford to hire accountants.

The First Minister herself has argued that it would be “crazy” to impose a 50 per cent tax band in Scotland because the rich would avoid paying it. But that makes the moral case for increasing taxes on standard rate tax payers exceptionally difficult. They aren’t living in paradise, and will resent paying more so that others can.