The Pandora Papers investigation involves more than 600 journalists from 150 media sites in 117 countries, making it the world’s largest journalistic collaboration.
The investigation is based on the release of confidential documents from 14 offshore service providers who give professional services to rich individuals and organizations seeking to establish shell companies and other entities in tax havens with low or no taxes. The entities allow owners to hide their names from the public and, in some cases, regulators. The providers frequently assist them in opening bank accounts in nations with weak financial regulations.
The information on the beneficial owners of corporations registered in the British Virgin Islands, Seychelles, Hong Kong, Belize, Panama, South Dakota, and other secrecy jurisdictions is unprecedented. They also include details about the shareholders, directors, and officers.
Some of the data in the papers, most of which is reviewed by ICIJ (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists), was created between 1996 and 2020. The papers discuss a wide range of topics like:
- The creation of shell companies, foundations, and trusts.
- The use of such entities to purchase real estate, yachts, jets, and life insurance.
- Their use to make investments and to move money between banks accounts.
- Estate planning and other inheritance issues.
- The avoidance of taxes through complex financial schemes.
What is inside the Pandora Papers?
The breach exposes more than 330 lawmakers from more than 90 nations and territories. They bought real estate, held money in trust, and owned other enterprises and assets through corporations based in secrecy jurisdictions, sometimes anonymously.
The Pandora Papers expose how banks and legal firms collaborate with offshore service providers to create complicated business structures. Despite their legal requirement to avoid doing business with those who engage in questionable operations, the files demonstrate that providers don’t always know their customers.
The study also investigates how US trust companies have taken use of secrecy laws in some states to assist affluent foreign clients to hide their assets and avoid paying taxes in their home countries.
What format did the information arrive in?
The data for the breach arrived in a variety of formats, with most of the data (11.9 million+ entries) being unstructured.
- Text documents made up more than half of the files (6.4 million), including more than 4 million PDFs, some of which were over 10,000 pages long.
- Passports, bank statements, tax declarations, firm incorporation paperwork, real estate contracts, and due diligence questionnaires were among the documents.
- The data breach also included over 4.1 million pictures and emails.
- 4% of the document data came through spreadsheets which make more than 467,000 of the total data.
- The data also had video files along with audio files, and slide shows.
Imran Khan has announced that each name will be investigated
Prime Minister Imran Khan has made it official that all the names in Pandora’s papers will be thoroughly investigated. He tweeted, “We welcome the Pandora Papers exposing the ill-gotten wealth of elites, accumulated through tax evasion & corruption & laundered out to financial “havens”.”
Furthermore, he also declared corruption as the root cause of all problems. He said, “My over-two decades struggle has been premised on the belief that countries are not poor, but corruption causes poverty because money is diverted from being invested in our people.”
