>What the authors are saying (I think) is that they tried the same tricks on the Panama data and got nothing useful out of it. The standard graph techniques don’t explain anything useful about what’s going on.

The impression I got was not that they found nothing useful, but that they didn't find broadly interconnected networks within the data.

If that's the case, it's likely that the transactions in the data aren't tightly linked.

Which is useful, in that it tells us that those involved in such activities are not a cabal of evil elites, rather they're disparate groups with little in common except their desire to avoid taxes/hide assets.

That conclusion certainly implies that addressing these activities will be more difficult as they are decentralized and widespread, but it's certainly not useless IMHO.