Panama Papers
[1][2][3][4][5][6] These documents, some dating back to the 1970s,[7] were created by, and taken from, the former Panamanian offshore law firm and corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca,[8][9] and compiled with similar leaks into a searchable database.
[11] Their publication made it possible to prosecute Jan Marsalek, a person of interest to a number of European governments and revealed his links with Russian intelligence,[12] and international financial fraudster Harald Joachim von der Goltz.
For example, the shell company Octea is registered to Beny Steinmetz and owes more than US$700,000 in property taxes to the city of Koidu in Sierra Leone, and is $150 million in debt, even though its exports were more than twice that in an average month in the 2012–2015 period.
[27] Other offshore shell company transactions described in the documents do seem to have broken exchange laws, violated trade sanctions or stemmed from political corruption, according to ICIJ reporters.
[31] One notable case involved former Iceland Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, who was found to possess a secret offshore account in a shell company called Wintris Inc., along with his wife.
"Tax havens are at the core of a global system that allows large corporations and wealthy individuals to avoid paying their fair share," said Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, "depriving governments, rich and poor, of the resources they need to provide vital public services and tackle rising inequality".
[44] International Monetary Fund (IMF) researchers estimated in July 2015 that profit shifting by multinational companies costs developing countries around US$213 billion a year, almost two percent of their national income.
[56] Andy Yan, an urban planning researcher and adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia, studied real estate sales in Vancouver—also thought to be affected by foreign purchasers—found that 18% of the transactions in Vancouver's most expensive neighborhoods were cash purchases, and 66% of the owners appeared to be Chinese nationals or recent arrivals from China.
[61] Panama, Vanuatu and Lebanon may find themselves on a list of uncooperative tax havens that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) re-activated in July 2016 at the request of G20 nations, warned Le Monde, a French newspaper that participated in the investigation.
[62] In April 2016, if this greylist had been in place it would have included nine countries: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahrain, Brunei, Dominica, Liberia, Nauru, Samoa, Tobago and the United Arab Emirates.
[62] The ICIJ helped organize the research and document review once Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) realized the scale of the work required to validate the authenticity of 2.6 terabytes[63] of leaked data.
[66][67][68] SZ also had concerns about security, not only for their source, the leaked documents, and their data, but also for the safety of some of their partners in the investigation living under corrupt regimes who might not want their money-handling practices made public.
[73] Using Nuix, Süddeutsche Zeitung reporters performed optical character recognition (OCR) processing on the millions of scanned documents, converting the data they contained to searchable and machine-readable text.
[84] Computer security expert Chris Kubecka announced on May 24, 2016, that the Mossack Fonseca client login portal was running four different government-grade remote access trojans (RATs).
[89] "This is a unique opportunity to test the effectiveness of leaktivism", said Micah White, co-founder of Occupy, "... the Panama Papers are being dissected via an unprecedented collaboration between hundreds of highly credible international journalists who have been working secretly for a year.
"[90] WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic investigative journalist who worked on Cablegate in 2010, said withholding some documents for a time does maximise the leak's impact, but called for full online publication of the Panama Papers eventually.
"[92] The whistleblower reported that the murder of journalists Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017 and Ján Kuciak in 2018 due to their investigations of the Panama Papers had deeply affected him and called upon the European Union to deliver justice.
Names of then-current national leaders in the documents include President Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, and the Prime Minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson.
[110] Mossack Fonseca has acted with global consultancy partners like Emirates Asset Management Ltd, Ryan Mohanlal Ltd, Sun Hedge Invest and Blue Capital Ltd on behalf of more than 300,000 companies, most of them registered in the British Overseas Territories.
[111] In 2008, Mossack Fonseca hired a 90-year-old British man to pretend to be the owner of the offshore company of Marianna Olszewski, a US businesswoman, "a blatant breach of anti-money laundering rules" according to the BBC.
More than 30 Mossack Fonseca clients were at some point in time blacklisted by the US Treasury Department, including businesses linked to senior figures in Russia, Syria and North Korea.
The other two, Maxima Middle East Trading and Morgan Additives Manufacturing Co, and their owners Wael Abdulkarim and Ahmad Barqawi, were said to have "engaged in deceptive measures" to supply oil products to Syria.
[127] In its official statement April 6,[128] Mossack Fonseca suggested that responsibility for any legal violations might lie with other institutions: approximately 90% of our clientele is comprised of professional clients ... who act as intermediaries and are regulated in the jurisdiction of their business.
"[161] Offshore companies are legal, said Panamanian lawyer and former controller of the republic Alvin Weeden; illegality arises when they are used for money laundering, arms smuggling, terrorism, or tax evasion.
[181] On April 22, 2016, Australia said it would create a public register showing the beneficial, or actual, owners of shell companies, as part of an effort to stamp out tax avoidance by multinational corporations.
[184] Leaked documents examined by the ABC "pierced the veil of anonymous shell companies" and linked a Sydney businessman and a Brisbane geologist to mining deals in North Korea.
[185] On May 12, 2016, the names of former Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Turnbull, and former Premier of New South Wales Neville Wran, were both found in the Panama Papers, due to the pair's former directorship of the Mossack Fonseca-incorporated company Star Technology Systems Limited.
New Zealand government policy is not to request disclosure of the identity of either the settlor or the beneficiaries of the trust, making the ownership secret, as well as concealing the assets from the trust-holder's home jurisdictions.
[187] On May 27, 2015, the US Department of Justice indicted a number of companies and individuals for conspiracy, corruption and racketeering in connection with bribes and kickbacks paid to obtain media and marketing rights for FIFA tournaments.
[194] Torneos & Traffic (T&T) is a subsidiary of Fox International Channels since 2005[195] (with investments since 2002) and is the same company involved in corrupt practices in the acquisition of rights to major South American soccer tournaments.
