You are right in that ultimately wealth will be transferred, but circumvention costs resources, especially with the extreme sanctions Russia is facing. If oligarchs now have to resort to loading gold bullion on submarines bound for South America then we did a good job

I'm not intimately familiar with what was in the Panama/Pandora/etc. papers, but if I recall correctly it was a lot more "run of the mill" tax evasion, exploiting loop-holes, and the like. In these cases, I'd guess governments weren't always highly incentivized (or were actively disincentivized) to deal with these sorts of actions.

In the present case, where governments are highly incentivized and the sanctions are quite specifically targeted, I'd expect more of an impact. Will it be enough? I suppose we will see.

One challenge I've seen is that it isn't like all these assets are just labeled with the owners' names. As a result, it make take time to actually enforce such sanctions, possibly too much time to have an immediate impact. Perhaps the threat will be enough, but, again, we'll see.

You are (mostly) wrong.

You are correct in that it's difficult to sanction some oligarch using gray markets for one-off transactions.

But it's very easy to sanction a corporation that is trying to do cross-border trade. If you're selling apples to Poland, your customers - legitimate businesses in Poland - aren't going to be making recurring payments to you through some weird Hawala scheme. They live in Poland, they aren't going to be flouting their country's sanctions laws.

While oligarchs may be fine, the Russian economy can be completely strangled, by cutting off its ability to pay for imports, or get paid for exports.

This also pisses on any remittances the Russian diaspora sends to their relatives back home.

In the long term, I fully expect a proxy banking system to be set up through either China, or one of Russia's satellites, to take care of the needs of the elite. I also expect that the West will either shut down, or keep open particular Russian exports on a case-by-case basis. It's why not every Russian bank has been cut off from SWIFT. If Europe hits a cold snap for instance, there'd still be a channel to buy natural gas...

Especially since they had a lot of time to prepare. But you can't move all your wealth at once, especially if you are not sure if a big event will happen. So it is likeky that they just diversified more outside of Russia. But they will likely still loose a lot.