The Panama Papers is an unprecedented investigation that reveals the offshore links of some of the globe's most prominent figures.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), together with the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and more than 100 other media partners, including the African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), spent a year sifting through 11.5 million leaked files to expose the offshore holdings of world political leaders, links to global scandals, and details of the hidden financial dealings of fraudsters, drug traffickers, billionaires, celebrities, sports stars and more.
The trove of documents is likely the biggest leak of inside information in history. It includes nearly 40 years of data from a little-known but powerful law firm based in Panama. That firm, Mossack Fonseca, has offices in more than 35 locations around the globe, and is one of the world's top creators of shell companies, the corporate structures that can be used to hide ownership of assets.
The data includes emails, financial spreadsheets, passports and corporate records revealing the secret owners of bank accounts and companies in 21 offshore jurisdictions, including Nevada, Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands.
ICIJ's data and research unit indexed, organized and analyzed the 2.6 terabytes of data that make up the leak, using collaborative platforms to communicate and share documents with journalists working in 25 languages in nearly 80 countries.
The secret files:
- Include 11.5 million records, dating back nearly 40 years – making it the largest leak in offshore history.
- Contain details on more than 214,000 offshore entities connected to people in more than 200 countries and territories.
- Show company owners in billionaires, sports stars, drug smugglers and fraudsters.
- Reveal the offshore holdings of 140 politicians and public officials around the world – including 12 current and former world leaders. Among them: the prime ministers of Iceland and Pakistan, the president of Ukraine, and the king of Saudi Arabia.
- Document some $2 billion in transactions secretly shuffled through banks and shadow companies by associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
- Include the names of at least 33 people and companies blacklisted by the U.S. authorities for doing business with drug traffickers, terror groups and/or rogue nations like North Korea and Iran.
- Show how major banks have driven the creation of hard-to-trace companies in offshore havens. More than 500 banks, their subsidiaries and their branches – including HSBC, UBS and Société Générale – created more than 15,000 offshore companies for their customers through Mossack Fonseca.
As ANCIR started researching, it discovered data disclosing 40 years of service from Mossack Fonseca stretching from Uganda to Namibia to Sierra Leone. The company’s questionable dealings is already well known after being exposed by investigative journalists such as Ken Silverstein.
ANCIR and its media partners’ investigations led to findings around Uganda’s missing taxes from oil revenue; a mega-infrastructure deal in Namibia connected to a FIFA-related entity; secrecy in Steinmetz’s diamond empire; and hidden players in Angola’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, to mention a few.
Further explosive stories from Zimbabwe, Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria will follow this week.
But the data revealed something far more insidious than a willingness to look past illegal activities.
It reflects a deliberate design on the part of companies like Mossack Fonseca to commercialise the inherent weaknesses of national and international legal and financial regimes by bulldozing the substance, process and purpose of “due diligence”.
Thanks to these structures – banking secrecy, opaque shell entities, use of nominees to conceal beneficial owners etc - each year, the continent loses some $150 billion to illicit financial flows (PDF)
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