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Much ado about Panama? Maybe not.

This month’s release of “the Panama Papers” — more than 11 million files on the alleged offshore tax arrangements of politicians, corporate chieftains and celebrities — has sparked a global uproar and prompted widespread calls for a crackdown on tax evasion and the hidden wealth of the rich. But don’t hold your breath for meaningful action to match the plentiful rhetoric.

From Barack Obama to François Hollande, and from Wolfgang Schäuble to the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe in the European Parliament, the line of politicians, international organizations and regulators vowing to “do something” about this latest scandal is almost as thick as the files themselves.

Supporters of tax reforms, including the European Commission and the U.S. government, hope the biggest offshore data leak in history will give new impetus to long-running efforts to bring order to the messy, secretive and competitive world of tax.

Others are not so sure. The reason is simple: Although any politician who promises to fight against tax evasion is on to a sure-fire vote-winner, national governments have shown a stubborn reluctance to share information, co-ordinate their moves and, least of all, harmonize tax regimes.

As if to underline those problems, Panama — the home of Mossack Fonseca, the law firm whose files were leaked — was never a signatory to voluntary tax agreements mandating transparency and due diligence. Those rules are set by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which has been trying to foster co-operation among governments ever since its founding in 1989.

“If Panama had fully implement the FATF standard, then we would be in shape,” said Grace Perez-Navarro, a senior tax specialist at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

The European Commission, as well as the German and French governments, among others, have long been concerned about individuals using accounts in another EU member country to evade taxes. Yet for a long time, resistance from Luxembourg — led at the time by current Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker — and Austria blocked reforms.

It wasn’t until the U.S. cracked down on foreign banks assisting American citizens to evade taxes that the objections began to crumble. The EU adopted new rules requiring tax authorities to exchange information about bank accounts in 2011 and about financial products in 2014. It has since struck deals introducing similar rules to neighboring jurisdictions, including Switzerland, Andorra, San Marino and Liechtenstein.

Public outrage

Now, officials and some governments think the papers’ revelations will lead to the approval of an idea floated by Pierre Moscovici, the EU commissioner whose portfolio includes taxation, of requiring Europe’s international partners, like Panama, to respect international tax standards or face being blacklisted. Last year, Moscovici compiled an EU blacklist but withdrew it in the face of resistance from capitals, including London, which was angry at seeing some of its dependencies included.

The Netherlands, which holds the EU’s rotating presidency, was already hoping to get EU ministers to give their backing to the idea by May. To prepare the ground, and strike while the furor is still raging, Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem has added a discussion of the Panama Papers to the agenda of a meeting of EU finance ministers later this month. If the plans are approved, “there would be a lot of pressure for countries like Panama to fall in line,” said one EU official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

In a separate move Jonathan Hill, the European commissioner for financial services, will on Tuesday propose long-awaited rules requiring companies to report detailed financial results on a country-by-country basis — an attempt by the EU executive to clamp down on country-shopping by companies seeking to minimize tax.

Both sets of proposals were already in the pipeline long before the Panama Papers were made public. “What you see happening in Brussels at the moment are Moscovici, Hill and others trying to use public outrage on Panama to try and push through other reforms that were already in the making,” said Frederik Erixon, director of the European Centre for International Political Economy.

Even more ambitious plans are in the works. In a discussion paper sent out at the weekend and seen by POLITICO, Schäuble proposes 10 measures to achieve the elusive goal of international cooperation on taxation and money laundering.

Among the German finance minister’s proposals are a global register of people using shell companies, a blacklist of countries that harbor tax evaders, and renewed pressure on banks and other service providers to stop doing business with suspicious characters.

The document — which will be championed by Schäuble  at the International Monetary Fund’s spring meetings this week, as well as in EU forums next week and the G20 summit in July — is an attempt by Germany to take the initiative. But critics point out that it lacks concrete ways to implement the plans and that the German government is not blameless on this subject.

Blacklist

Fabio de Masi, an MEP for Germany’s leftist Die Linke party, pointed out that Schäuble’s transparency plans doesn’t include trusts, one of the key vehicles used to minimize taxes, according to the Panama Papers. He also accused Schäuble of “double-speak” in ongoing negotiations, because Germany blocked an attempt to make public registers of owners of shell companies.

As the Panama case shows, only a global pact can truly address these issues. Enter the OECD. The group of mostly rich countries escalated its work on tax evasion in 2009 in the wake of the financial crisis. The main goal was to ensure tax authorities exchanged information automatically, leading to new global standards and a peer-review system.

But progress has been slow, and not without its opponents.

The OECD’s standards are controversial in some quarters because they would divert tax revenues away from poorer countries to OECD’s members, said Tove Ryding, a tax specialist at the European Network on Debt and Development, a campaign group. Creating a blacklist of countries also risks targeting weaker countries, said Ryding: “The blacklist becomes a list of countries that can’t apply enough pressure to get themselves off.”

Meanwhile, sanctions and enforcement actions could precede any new rules. Aside from going after individuals, a key constituency regulators may target is banks and other financial advisers. Although there is no suggestion they acted improperly, several international banks — including HSBC, Credit Suisse, and UBS — have been named in the papers and are likely to face yet another set of inquiries and reputational challenges.

But perhaps the most long-term effect of the Panama Papers will be to remind governments and other institutions that they can no longer assume that “private” information can remain that way forever.

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“[The papers] are part of a much broader trend towards what we call ‘forced transparency’ that, for its part, will be transformational,” wrote Cliff Kupchan and Andrew Bishop of the geopolitical consultancy Eurasia Group.

“No longer do institutions control their flows of information. WikiLeaks fired the opening salvo, the Panama Papers are 1,000 times larger, and the next episode will likely be even greater … armed with limited technical resources, individuals can now single-handedly take on institutions and governments.”