Dozens of journalists sifted through millions of leaked records and thousands of names to produce ICIJ\u2019s investigation into offshore secrecy<\/p>\n
By Gerard Ryle, Marina Walker Guevara, Michael Hudson, Nicky Hager, Duncan Campbell and Stefan Candea<\/p>\n
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists<\/p>\n
A cache of 2.5 million files has cracked open the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts, exposing hidden dealings of politicians, con men and the mega-rich the world over.<\/p>\n
The secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists lay bare the names behind covert companies and private trusts in the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands and other offshore hideaways.<\/p>\n
They include American doctors and dentists and middle-class Greek villagers as well as families and associates of long-time despots, Wall Street swindlers, Eastern European and Indonesian billionaires, Russian corporate executives, international arms dealers and a sham-director-fronted company that the European Union has labeled as a cog in Iran\u2019s nuclear-development program.<\/p>\n
The leaked files provide facts and figures \u2014 cash transfers, incorporation dates, links between companies and individuals \u2014 that illustrate how offshore financial secrecy has spread aggressively around the globe, allowing the wealthy and the well-connected to dodge taxes and fueling corruption and economic woes in rich and poor nations alike. The records detail the offshore holdings of people and companies in more than 170 countries and territories.<\/p>\n
The hoard of documents represents the biggest stockpile of inside information about the offshore system ever obtained by a media organization. The total size of the files, measured in gigabytes, is more than 160 times larger than the leak of U.S. State Department documents by Wikileaks in 2010.<\/p>\n
To analyze the documents, ICIJ collaborated with reporters from The Guardian and the BBC in the U.K., Le Monde in France, S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung and Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Germany, The Washington Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and 31 other media partners around the world.<\/p>\n
Eighty-six journalists from 46 countries used high-tech data crunching and shoe-leather reporting to sift through emails, account ledgers and other files covering nearly 30 years.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve never seen anything like this. This secret world has finally been revealed,\u201d said Arthur Cockfield, a law professor and tax expert at Queen\u2019s University in Canada, who reviewed some of the documents during an interview with the CBC. He said the documents remind him of the scene in the movie classic The Wizard of Oz in which \u201cthey pull back the curtain and you see the wizard operating this secret machine.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mobsters and Oligarchs<\/p>\n
The vast flow of offshore money \u2014 legal and illegal, personal and corporate \u2014 can roil economies and pit nations against each other. Europe\u2019s continuing financial crisis has been fueled by a Greek fiscal disaster exacerbated by offshore tax cheating and by a banking meltdown in the tiny tax haven of Cyprus, where local banks\u2019 assets have been inflated by waves of cash from Russia.<\/p>\n
Anti-corruption campaigners argue that offshore secrecy undermines law and order and forces average citizens to pay higher taxes to make up for revenues that vanish offshore. Studies have estimated that cross-border flows of global proceeds of financial crimes total between $1 trillion and $1.6 trillion a year.<\/p>\n
ICIJ\u2019s 15-month investigation found that, alongside perfectly legal transactions, the secrecy and lax oversight offered by the offshore world allows fraud, tax dodging and political corruption to thrive.<\/p>\n
Offshore patrons identified in the documents include:<\/p>\n
\u2022 Individuals and companies linked to Russia\u2019s Magnitsky Affair, a tax fraud scandal that has strained U.S.-Russia relations and led to a ban on Americans adopting Russian orphans.<\/p>\n
\u2022 A Venezuelan deal maker accused of using offshore entities to bankroll a U.S.-based Ponzi scheme and funneling millions of dollars in bribes to a Venezuelan government official.<\/p>\n
\u2022 A corporate mogul who won billions of dollars in contracts amid Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev\u2019s massive construction boom even as he served as a director of secrecy-shrouded offshore companies owned by the president\u2019s daughters.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Indonesian billionaires with ties to the late dictator Suharto, who enriched a circle of elites during his decades in power.<\/p>\n
The documents also provide possible new clues to crimes and money trails that have gone cold.<\/p>\n