https://panamapapers.icij.org/blog/2016 ... dings.html- Contains details on more than 214,000 offshore entities connected to people in more than 200 countries and territories.
- 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.
https://panamapapers.icij.org/graphs/
https://panamapapers.icij.org/the_power_players/
https://panamapapers.icij.org/
https://panamapapers.icij.org/20160403- ... rview.html
A huge leak of confidential documents has revealed how the rich and powerful use tax havens to hide their wealth.
Eleven million documents were leaked from one of the world's most secretive companies, Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.
They show how Mossack Fonseca has helped clients launder money, dodge sanctions and evade tax.
The company says it has operated beyond reproach for 40 years and has never been charged with criminal wrong-doing.... The documents show links to 72 current or former heads of state in the data, including dictators accused of looting their own countries.
BBC Panorama and The Guardian are among 107 media organisations in 78 countries that have been analysing the documents. The BBC does not know the identity of the source who provided them.
Gerard Ryle, director of the ICIJ, said the documents covered the day-to-day business at Mossack Fonseca over the past 40 years.
"I think the leak will prove to be probably the biggest blow the offshore world has ever taken because of the extent of the documents," he said.
The data contains secret offshore companies linked to the families and associates of Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak, Libya's former leader Muammar Gaddafi and Syria's president Bashar al-Assad.
Mossack Fonseca data also shows how Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson had an undeclared interest in his country's bailed-out banks.
... Mr Gunnlaugsson is now facing calls for his resignation.
The Panama Papers: how to hide a billion dollars – video explainer
What you need to know about the Panama Papers
...The files expose offshore companies controlled by the prime ministers of Iceland and Pakistan, the king of Saudi Arabia and the children of the president of Azerbaijan.
They also include at least 33 people and companies blacklisted by the U.S. government because of evidence that they’d been involved in wrongdoing, such as doing business with Mexican drug lords, terrorist organizations like Hezbollah or rogue nations like North Korea and Iran.
One of those companies supplied fuel for the aircraft that the Syrian government used to bomb and kill thousands of its own citizens, U.S. authorities have charged.
“These findings show how deeply ingrained harmful practices and criminality are in the offshore world,” said Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley and author of “The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens.” Zucman, who was briefed on the media partners’ investigation, said the release of the leaked documents should prompt governments to seek “concrete sanctions” against jurisdictions and institutions that peddle offshore secrecy.
World leaders who have embraced anti-corruption platforms feature in the leaked documents. The files reveal offshore companies linked to the family of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, who has vowed to fight “armies of corruption,” as well as Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who has positioned himself as a reformer in a country shaken by corruption scandals. The files also contain new details of offshore dealings by the late father of British Prime Minister David Cameron, a leader in the push for tax-haven reform.
Offshore corporations - The secret shell game
... Not only do they show that the Nevada subsidiary was wholly owned by Mossack Fonseca, but also that, behind the scenes, the firm took active steps to wipe potentially incriminating records from phones and computers to hide details of their clients from the U.S. justice system.
An email from 2014, for instance, instructs that links to Mossack Fonseca’s cloud-computing system from Nevada have “to be obscure to the investigators.” Other emails report that tech operatives working remotely from Panama “tried to clean the logs of the PC’s in the Nevada office” and planned to run a “remote session to eliminate the traces of direct access to our CIS” – the firm’s computer information system.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation- ... 29322.html