A network of offshore companies. Trusts and foundations located on obscure islands. Dictators and

democratically elected politicians mingling on the books of the same law firm. The scandal that has erupted around the Panamanian lawyers Mossack Fonseca has a colorful enough cast of characters, and enough mysterious deals, to keep thriller writers in business for years.

But it is more than just entertainment, and there is more than simply a few billion dollars of offshore assets at stake. In reality, the Panama Papers scandal, coming on the back of a series of major leaks, is likely to spell the final demise of the sealed-off world of offshore finance.

There will be losers from that — mainly high-end real estate agents in places such as the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands.

But there will be winners as well. The world’s wealthy may no longer be able to stash their money secretly in tiny islands, and yet they won’t suddenly want to pay huge sums of tax on it either. The big beneficiaries will be the mainstream countries with the lowest corporate tax rates — and those are Ireland, Switzerland and Britain.

The Panama Papers, as the vast cache of papers leaked from Mossack Fonseca, are already known, are causing ripples around the world as the details of the offshore accounts and shell companies are revealed.

In Iceland, Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson has resigned. In Britain, the Prime Minister David Cameron is under pressure, as it turns out his late father was mixed up in some of the schemes that have come to light. In Russia, President Vladimir Putin is coming under fresh scrutiny for the extent of the fortune he has accumulated while in office — although nothing ever actually seems to undermine his power in that country.

As more and more of the 11 million pages of documentation, covering more than 300,000 offshore entities, are sifted through by reporters and indeed by tax officials, then no doubt more names will come under the spotlight.

What happens to the law firm in question, and to the individuals who have been named, remains to be seen. Some will be guilty of nothing more than shifting money around for legitimate business purposes. Others no doubt have been side-stepping taxes for year. The bigger point, however, is surely this. It is hard too see how the offshore industry can survive revelations of this sort.

It is not the first time this has happened. In 2008, Herve Falciani leaked the names of thousands of people with money hidden in Swiss accounts, leading to years of investigations in a dozen or more countries.

In an age when terabytes of data can be made available anywhere at the swipe of a smart-phone icon, it is hard to see how anything can remain confidential. From now on, anyone setting up a shell company in the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, or any of a dozen or more offshore centres, will have to assume that at some point their name may well be splashed all across the media.

Panama Papers: The Big Picture

There will of course be calls for tighter laws — in Germany, lawmakers are already arguing for more restrictions on the use of foreign accounts. But it was never really the law that was the problem — in most countries, it has always been legal to hold your money anywhere you like, so long you pay the relevant taxes on it in your home country. It is the exposure that matters. The main advantage of offshore centers was always secrecy — and now that that has been blown, there is not much point in them any more.

The question then is, where does that money go? The amount held in offshore accounts is sometimes exaggerated — some of the commentary assumes that if only it could be uncovered, all the world’s fiscal problems could be solved at a stroke. That is not really true. Even so, it is still a lot.

The economist Gabriel Zucman in his book “The Hidden Wealth of Nations” last year estimated it $7.6 trillion. That may or may not be right — by definition, it is not easy to count stuff that is hidden — but if it is anything close that is huge sum.

It would be wrong to assume that money will just go back to its home country, however. Instead, it is likely to go to more legitimate destinations that just happen to have relatively low taxes, but which are still reasonably transparent, and where the rule of law is strong. If you can’t put money into a Cayman Islands trust, why not just put it into a corporate structure instead?

There are some small countries with very, very low corporate rates. In Macedonia for example, the corporate rate is only 10%. In Montenegro, it is a point lower at 9% (perhaps there is something about the Aegean that makes people reluctant to levy taxes on companies). But it is unlikely that people will want to stack up too much money in untested and little known nations such as those. It is far more likely that they will go for some of the bigger ones.

Hong Kong with a 16.5% rate would be one possibility — although China does not look that stable or secure right now.

Far more plausible is the Irish rate, which has been 12.5% for years. Switzerland’s bank secrecy is long gone. But its corporate tax rate is less than 18%, which is not too onerous. The most interesting one may well be the U.K. Britain has been aggressively lowering its corporate rate — it is now just 20% and is scheduled to come down to 17% over the next couple of years. London has all the infrastructure as global billionaire could want.

There are going to be some huge sums of money looking for a new, relatively safe home in the next year. It is fair bet that a lot of it will end up in Dublin, Geneva and London — and the losses for Panama City and Grand Cayman will be a gain for those cities.