The inaction raises questions about the response by Congress and the Obama administration to the unprecedented leak that rocked governments in Iceland, Pakistan and the United Kingdom and prompted investigations worldwide.

"The biggest financial scandal involving offshores is greeted with a yawn by U.S. law enforcement officials?" said Charles Intriago, a former federal prosecutor and money-laundering expert in Miami. "It doesn't make any sense that a pot of evidentiary gold is going unpursued by the U.S. Department of Justice."

In the weeks following the April 3 publication of stories across the globe about hidden offshore fortunes, President Barack Obama vowed to work with Congress to tackle reform aimed at offshore companies. His Justice Department declared that it "takes very seriously all credible allegations of high-level, foreign corruption that might have a link to the United States or the U.S. financial system."

Yet as of June 23, Panama said it had not received a single request from the United States for access to the data seized by Panamanian authorities from Mossack Fonseca, the law firm at the heart of the Panama Papers, said Sandra Sotillo, spokeswoman for Panamanian Attorney General Kenia Porcell.

On Capitol Hill, there is also little movement.

Obama's proposed legislation to change reporting on the true owners of companies does not appear to have found any sponsor. The White House did not respond to questions.

The top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, Oregon's Ron Wyden, and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who sits on the Judiciary Committee, have unsuccessfully tried to attach an amendment to a defense spending bill. The plan would have made states provide the names of the true owners of limited liability companies to the Treasury Department. Such companies often are used to keep owners' names secret.

On the question of inaction, Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr declined to comment. So did the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Panama. Mossack Fonseca has declined to comment since April, when it denied wrongdoing.

In an opinion piece published in April, Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela vowed international cooperation through "a robust treaty network that allows exchange of information."

A day later, on April 12, Panamanian authorities raided the offices of Mossack Fonseca, whose 11.5 million leaked documents provided the material for the yearlong secret and collaborative global reporting effort led by the U.S. nonprofit the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

The Panamanian daily newspaper La Prensa reported that day that investigators had seized electronic records from the law firm. To date, only Paraguay, Venezuela and Bolivia have requested information, Sotillo said, declining to speculate why, noting only that "every government determines that."

Authorities in Brazil, Peru and El Salvador also raided offices or intermediaries associated with Mossack Fonseca. The law firm quit its Nevada and Wyoming operations after state penalties and probes.

In the United States, Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, asked the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to share data with his office. Although the consortium declined for reasons of journalistic freedoms, Bharara made it clear that he still wants to examine the data for a criminal investigation into "matters to which the Panama Papers are relevant."

He didn't specify what kind of criminal investigation had been launched. A spokeswoman for Bharara declined to comment.

Defendants in Justice Department criminal prosecutions across the country were discovered in the data, including those pursued by his office.

Despite the delay in seeking the data, Bharara and other prosecutors are likely still interested in pursuing an investigation, said Michael Padula, a former federal prosecutor in the Justice Department's criminal division.

The United States would probably request the information under a mutual legal assistance treaty, which sets out the terms under which the U.S. and another country are willing to share law enforcement data, he said.

"Believe it or not, it is not as simple as it sounds," said Padula, who left the Justice Department in March to practice law in Miami. "You can't just put together a three- or four-page request for this sort of thing. It can be time-consuming to get the request together."

Padula thought many U.S. attorneys other than Bharara might be interested. If so, officials in the Justice Department's headquarters would want to decide how to organize a broader investigation.

"You can't be sending Panama 25 different requests," Padula said. "Given the sensitivity of the topic, they would want to make sure it's one request and it's organized."

So far, U.S. law enforcement appears to have not taken any public steps. If a federal grand jury has been empaneled to consider criminal charges related to the Panama Papers, it would be held in secret.

Intriago thought that the IRS and the FBI were interested in pursuing the evidence and eventually investigations. He guessed that "bureaucratic inertia" was to blame.

"Having worked as a federal prosecutor, I know how slowly the federal government can work, especially when it comes to international matters," he said.

However, prosecutors shouldn't let too much time go by, he said. Evidence could be tainted and witnesses difficult to locate.

"The more time that goes by, the harder it is to prosecute," Intriago said. "There's always a danger in letting a case linger."

Roma Theus, another former federal prosecutor, was surprised it had taken so long to ask for the data.

"It's not three-months difficult," he said of the process.

He also wondered why European countries, such as Germany or England, haven't requested the data.

"It's a very legitimate question why they haven't, given the enormous amount of data that's available on potential corruption and other crimes," Theus said. "It's inexplicable."

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The Panama Papers – a leak of 11.5 million files from Mossack Fonseca, the world's fourth largest offshore law firm – have shed light on the ways in which the global rich use tax havens to grow ever richer. Across the world, the elite uses secretive systems unavailable to mere mortals to add to their already bountiful heaps of gold. There have been stories about Putin, Assad and David Cameron's dad. I wanted to find out just how involved the British establishment is in these kinds of shenanigans, so I called up the tax expert Richard Murphy, Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University and director of Tax Research UK, for a chat.

VICE: Hi Richard, I was wondering if you could bring this story back home for us. How deeply involved is the UK? Why does it matter?
Richard Murphy: Well, this is the story of offshore. Offshore is a British creation. Tax havens pre-date the creation of offshore. Some of those early tax havens were indeed British, like Jersey. Others were places like Switzerland, which certainly existed as a tax haven before World War Two... Offshore, as a phenomenon, was created in the 1950s by the Bank of England, and the idea of it is that you have a place, originally the UK, where transactions are recorded but they actually take place somewhere else. So, "elsewhere" is very important in the idea of offshore. It simply means: not here.

What it also means is: we won't ask where "elsewhere" is. That is critical to the understanding of what's going on. Not only did we create it, we also created some of the most effective tax havens used for offshore purposes. And even though what we've got published is a Panamanian law firm, the tax haven which they used the most is the British Virgin Islands. The Queen's head is on the stamp. We are responsible for this overseas territory of the UK. The laws of the British Virgin Islands are approved in Privy Council, the committee, effectively, of the cabinet. So these places are effectively under British control.

The activities brought to light by the Panama leak is a British creation, then?
We came up with the idea of offshore, we created many of the places that are doing it and right at the centre of this Panamanian leak is a British tax haven. Which is one of the major referring banks to this Panamanian law firm? HSBC. Another? Coutts, the Queen's bank...

So the whole British system continues to make good use of these offshore structures?
Yes, indeed, and British advisors were the second biggest source of business for this Panamanian law firm.

What kind of advisors?
Bankers, lawyers, accountants... what my friend [tax justice campaigner and academic] Prem Sikka calls, with some degree of justification, the "pinstripe mafia".

This is something the British are good at. A lot of those involved are not breaking any laws. There's a smooth façade and old laws that hide corruption.
Not just old laws, but old customs. The fundamental thing about offshore is that you turn a blind eye. We even see that in the defence issued by the law firm in Panama. They say they are not responsible in any way for the activities of the companies that they create because they are taking place elsewhere. But they're turning a blind eye to it. They say, "We've made sure that all the legal obligations of these companies are complied with", and they have in the British Virgin Islands and in Panama and wherever else they've used because there are almost no legal obligations in Panama. There won't be any obligation to file accounts, to file a tax return – there will just be an obligation to send a fee every year to the Panamanian government, which is a kickback they get for providing this service, as does the British Virgin Islands. Otherwise, the British Virgin Islands don't ask for any information. The obligation to be legal in the British Virgin Islands is fulfilled by writing a cheque.

Who else is benefitting from this and how is the government involved?
The British government will not be benefitting from it and it will be losing tax revenue. But here's a conflict of interest: we hear that David Cameron's father was a person who may have benefitted from it. The government is not an autonomous entity; it is made up of people, some of whom may be conflicted. We don't know if David Cameron is or not – he's refused to say. He hasn't said if he has any remaining interests in the company his father ran. He's just said it's his private affair. That's also unacceptable.

I'm not holding David Cameron responsible for what his father did, but he's conflicted because he won't tell us whether he has benefitted from a company that has offshore interests. He's been saying he's going to close down tax havens, but at some point his family has benefitted from them. I think that's indisputable. What this whole structuring of arrangements does – this secrecy – is create desperately difficult situations for people. They want to pretend one thing, but are conflicted by another. That, in essence, is the danger of tax havens. They are designed to undermine trust by creating secrecy.

This is an example of the erosion of democracy then.
Yes, I think so. Democracy requires that we all make our fair contribution as required by law. Tax havens provide secrecy that means there must at least be doubt about that fact. I believe that the firms who are also providing services in these places – including British companies operating in Panama and the British Virgin Islands like Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst & Young, and PricewaterhouseCoopers – are participating in the gain to be made from the sale of secrecy. HSBC, by the way, is also one of the biggest bankers in the British Virgin Islands.

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