The Pandora Papers’s 11.9 million records arrived from 14 different offshore services firms in a jumble of files and formats – even ink-on-paper – presenting a massive data-management challenge. It exposes the offshore secrets of wealthy elites from more than 200 countries and territories. They include more than 330 politicians and 130 Forbes billionaires, as well as celebrities, fraudsters, drug dealers, royal family members and leaders of religious groups around the world. These are people who use tax and secrecy havens to buy property and hide assets; many avoid taxes and worse.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists spent more than a year structuring, researching and analyzing the more than 11.9 million records in the Pandora Papers leak. The task involved three main elements: journalists, technology and time.
This new investigation on the most famous tax havens in the world. A journalistic collaboration of unprecedented scope, which brought together 617 journalists and allowed the identification of more than 29,000 beneficiaries of offshore companies.
A gesture, even the most insignificant, can sometimes make a name enter the collective memory. Pandora, for example, owes her notoriety to the simple fact of having opened a box, letting all the evils of the earth escape in the process. In 2021, history repeats itself. A new “box” has just been opened. And it is likely to cause some upheaval.
The investigation is based on a leak of confidential records of 14 offshore service providers that give professional services to wealthy individuals and corporations seeking to incorporate shell companies, trusts, foundations and other entities in low- or no-tax jurisdictions. The entities enable owners to conceal their identities from the public and sometimes from regulators. Often, the providers help them open bank accounts in countries with light financial regulation.
The records include an unprecedented amount of information on so-called beneficial owners of entities registered in the British Virgin Islands, Seychelles, Hong Kong, Belize, Panama, South Dakota and other secrecy jurisdictions. They also contain information on the shareholders, directors and officers. In addition to the rich, the famous and the infamous, those exposed by the leak include people who don’t represent a public interest and who don’t appear in our reporting, such as small business owners, doctors and other, usually affluent, individuals away from the public spotlight.
