Sundays are typically not hot days for news, but that was not the case with last Sunday, when massive nearly 1.5 terabytes of data leaked to reveal 13.4 million records that detail offshore holdings by prominent figures from the world of politics, business, and entertainment.
Coming to light a year and a half after the largest data leak to date, the Panama Papers, that revealed the names of individuals, among which several national leaders, and celebrities who paid the Panama-based Mossack Fonseca (the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm) to set up offshore entities in tax havens around the world, the Paradise Papers – containing materials from two offshore service providers and the company registries of 19 tax havens – is the world’s second largest data leak, to be once again acquired by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, and to highlight diverse names as Queen Elizabeth, U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Lord Ashcroft, Madonna, Bono, along with Donald Trump’s cabinet ministers, Indian politicians, government-owned firms and business giants like Apple, Facebook and Walmart.
The offshore finance industry, through a system of double taxation, trusts and shell companies, is estimated to devirt about 10% of the size of the world’s economy. And while offshoring and tax havens are not necessary illegal, the topic is controversial and labelled as ‘unethical’.
The Paradise Papers leak, reflecting millions of financial and correspondence documents, reveals how some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals and world’s biggest multinational companies legally duck taxes and regulations and how the sheltered financial power is sometimes used to influence international politics.
The official source of the Paradise Papers has not been revealed, yet 16 days before the first stories published, a Reddit user, under the username PanPthrowaway, hinting at the coming leak, revealed its name: “…The next leaks will involve senior members of the Trump administration…..In around two weeks you will see some damaging reports come out regarding Wilbur Ross (not related to Paradise).…Good journalism takes time. There are literally hundreds of people working on Paradise and they do not want to screw it up”
The name Paradise Papers should had been chosen either after the French term for a tax haven ‘paradis fiscal,’ or after the idyllic, paradise-like profiles of most of the offshore jurisdictions whose workings are unveiled, Mauritius & Seychelles, the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, where the offshore legal service firm Appleby, that is at the centre of the leaked databases, is founded and headquartered.
