The journalists, working with news organisations from around the world, including the BBC and The Guardian, sifted through 2.5 million files revealing the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore companies. The files focused mainly on companies based within the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands and other “offshore hideaways”.
According to a statement on the ICIJ’s website, those exposed by the files 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 labelled as a cog in Iran’s nuclear-development program”.
The leaked files provide facts and figures, including cash transfers, incorporation dates and links between individuals and companies, which, said the ICIJ, “illustrate how offshore financial secrecy has spread aggressively around the globe, allowing the wealthy and the well-connected to dodge taxes and fuelling corruption and economic woes in rich and poor nations alike”.
James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey & Co., estimates that wealthy individuals have $21trn to $32trn in private financial wealth “tucked away in offshore havens – roughly equivalent to the size of the US and Japanese economies combined”.
A number of high profile politicians and high net worth individuals are specifically named in the documents. These include the deputy speaker of Mongolia’s Parliament, a top Canadian lawyer, Tony Merchant, Denise Rich, a Grammy-winning musician and fundraiser for the American Democratic Party and James R. Mellon of the Mellon dynasty which started landmark companies such as Gulf Oil and Mellon Bank.
To read more about the revelations please visit the ICIJ’s website by clicking here
