Nick Fountain

I do.

To be clear, it is perfectly fine and reasonable and understandable to want to pay as little in taxes as possible.

When you do that legally, we call it tax avoidance.

This story is about the mushy area between tax avoidance and doing illegal things to avoid taxes, tax evasion.

And it turns out the line between those two things is not hard and fast.

It's ever-changing and contested.

People and the government are constantly pushing it back and forth.

It's a battlefield.

And because it is a battlefield, people don't love to talk openly about their tactics.

I've made many calls for this story where people say, I would want to talk to you, but my lawyer says, don't do it.

Welcome to my life.

Yes.

But one person who, Lauren, you suggested might agree to go on the record and try to help us understand how the wealthy move their money around to pay fewer taxes is Andrew Gradman.

Andrew is a tax lawyer, and he's looked into the Malta loophole.

And what we wanted to learn from Andrew in particular was how exactly these loopholes came into existence.

In particular, how this loophole, having to do with Malta, came to be.

Like, where did this all start?

That's exactly what I'm looking for.

But we have some clues as to where it came from.

It all started because of a treaty with Malta, the U.S.-Malta Tax Treaty of 2008.