Risk register · entry
Q-F · FraudPanama Papers / Mossack Fonseca
11.5 million files from one law firm. Every shell company had a real owner it was built to hide.
The fifth quadrant, where the thing was never real. The tell is that the story is too clean.
Why this room
The Panama Papers is placed in qf as a disclosure event that exposed a concealment industry: 11.5 million internal files from a single firm showed that the beneficial ownership of 214,488 offshore entities had been engineered to be unfindable, so the clean legal surface of each vehicle was the product being sold. The qf tell is structural rather than transactional: entities incorporated in permissive jurisdictions with nominee directors and bearer arrangements presented a story of ordinary corporate housekeeping that was designed not to survive a look behind it. The register's classification rests on the fact that opacity itself was the deliverable, not on a claim that every one of the entities was unlawful.
The record
- The leak comprised 11.5 million internal files, totalling 2.6 terabytes, from the Panama-headquartered law firm Mossack Fonseca, then the world's fourth-largest offshore incorporator.certain
- The records cover nearly 40 years, from 1977 through the end of 2015, and contain information on 214,488 offshore entities (reported by ICIJ elsewhere as more than 210,000 companies in 21 offshore jurisdictions) connected to people in more than 200 countries and territories.certain
- The files were obtained by the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung and shared with ICIJ; more than 370 journalists from over 100 media organisations worked the data for about 12 months before simultaneous publication on 3 April 2016.certain
- ICIJ's analysis identified more than 140 politicians and public officials, including current and former heads of state, among those linked to the offshore entities.high
Sources
The book
This entry is one of 111 in the register. The full story, and what it cost the people who lived it, is in Risky Business by Claudia Zeisberger, David Munro and Joanna Reijgersberg-Siew.
Join the waiting list