Image source, PA

Prime Minister Theresa May told an audience at the Confederation of British Industry conference: "We have been continuing the work that David Cameron started - he started it not just for the UK but on international stage as well.

"So we have seen more revenues coming to HMRC over the last few years since 2010 - £160bn extra that they have been able to raise.

"There is already work that is being done to ensure that we see greater transparency in the dependencies and British overseas territories and we continue to work with them. HMRC is already able to seek more information about the ownership of shell companies for example, so they can ensure sure that people are paying their tax.

"We want to people to pay the tax that is due."

Today Programme
BBC Radio 4

Emma Chamberlain is a council member at the Chartered Institute of Taxation and is also on the General Anti-Abuse Rule (GAAR) advisory panel.

She tells Today: "I don’t think we can or indeed should want to stop people who have genuine overseas financial and business interests from holding assets in overseas companies.

"The real question is are they paying tax somewhere on those profits and if they are not, why not?

"Certainly, tax havens are sometimes used to avoid paying tax in two or three different jurisdictions because we have a very complicated worldwide tax code which doesn’t really interact very well together.

"There is a key point here with Commons Reporting Standard just coming online in September 2017 - for the first time revenue authorities in various countries, including the UK, will be able to get access to a lot more of this information in different jurisdictions including Bermuda, Cayman…

"And that will enable authorities to identify tax avoidance."

Today Programme
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Ann Pettifor, the director of policy research in macroeconomics at the PRIME Network of economists, tells Today: "They (those who invest in offshore tax havens) do it precisely to avoid tax but also to have the flexibility that they feel they need to move their money anywhere around the world wherever they can make the capital gains.

"Above all if we want to tax the rich then we must manage those capital flows.

"We must bring offshore back onshore.

"We are paying those taxes and we are not."

Image source, PA

Brian Palmer, tax policy expert at the Association of Accounting Technicians, offers some industry insight.

"In its purest form, there is nothing wrong with tax planning when it is merely arranging one’s affairs in the most tax efficient manner under UK legislation," he says.

"Over the last decade or so, however, there has been a conflation of the words avoidance and evasion, resulting in some perfectly legitimate tax planning being perceived to be inappropriate by the public and the media."

Mr Palmer says it's all right for taxpayers or businesses to organise their affairs in such a way as to mitigate their exposure to tax under UK law. The problem arises when people enter into "an arrangement that lacks a commercial purpose other than to avoid tax".

"While it could be argued that all those who knowingly enter into inappropriate schemes should suffer reputational damage, as things currently stand, that only happens when a taxpayer, such as a celebrity or a multi-national company, is 'outed' by the press," he points out.

"The Paradise Papers scandal is not in itself, in my opinion, justification for taxpayers to publish their tax returns nor should it give rise to a need to create legislation to compel them to."

The premier of Bermuda David Burt said Bermuda has a "robust regulatory regime" and it has had the same tax system since 1898, and added the UK's tax law allows the use of offshore tax havens.

Mr Burt said: "Bermuda cannot make a change to its laws to address the challenge of what you are looking at, what you are discussing is the United Kingdom law.

"There is nothing that has been found that is illegal or contrary to law."

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable has criticised the British government for a lack of a "clamp down" on offshore tax havens trading under the British flag.

The Paradise Papers story broke on Sunday night, but someone tried to give the game away in advance. The Quartz website has this story, external about how "a prescient post" on Reddit hinted at the revelations 16 days early.

Today Programme
BBC Radio 4

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell tells the Today programme: "I’m pretty shocked but not surprised.

"This has been going on for so long."

He said a full public inquiry into tax avoidance and a full register into all companies and trusts and "much greater scrutiny".

"I actually think there is an issue of morality here," he says.

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More from Labour MP Dame Margaret Hodge.

She says the problem is not just that the well-off are using tax avoidance methods, but that a huge industry has sprung up to help them do so.

"There is an army of advisers, accountants, lawyers, people working for banks, who make millions advising the rich on how to hide their money."

Labour's Dame Margaret Hodge tells BBC Breakfast: "I hope on the back of these Paradise Papers that the government will stop the rhetoric and start the action.

"If we want a fairer society, we have to close down on our tax havens.

"As long as they exist the super rich and big corporations will chose to hide their money, avoid taxes and we won’t have everybody giving according to their wealth, or according to their income, into the common pot for the common good.

"They’re not being asked to pay more than is due."

She said a Labour government would ensure all tax havens were open and transparent and said HMRC had to be "much more aggressive".

Pressure group Tax Justice Network says it wrote to the Queen four years ago, calling on her to "exert all possible influence to address one of the most harmful fault lines in the global economy" - ie tax havens in British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies.

Read the letter here, external

Image source, Tax Justice Network

The U2 frontman Bono used a company based in Malta to pay for a share in a shopping centre in a small town in the north-east of Lithuania, the Paradise Papers, external reveal, reports the Guardian, external.

Bono’s spokeswoman told the newspaper: “Bono was a passive, minority investor in Nude Estates Malta Ltd, a company that was legally registered in Malta until it was voluntarily wound up in 2015. Malta is a well-established holding company jurisdiction within the EU.”

BBC World Service

Image source, Getty Images

"So we see that [US Commerce Secretary] Wilbur Ross had a stake in a shipping firm that had as a client a pretty important Russian company - who was partly owned by not only the son-in-law of president Vladimir Putin - but also at least two other sanctioned Russian oligarchs," Will Fitzgibbon, of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists told BBC World Service.

"So in effect what we have is the US secretary of commerce having a stake in a company that's making tens of millions of dollars off a Russian entity who's owned - at least in part - by some pretty important people within the Putin inner circle."