Top Highlights

• In April 2016 something else hidden in plain sight was exposed. Namely that the secret offshore industry – centred in tax havens like the British Virgin Islands – was not, as had been previously thought, a minor part of our economic system. Rather it was the system. Those who dutifully paid their taxes were, in fact, dupes. The rich, it turned out,...
• It included the records of 214,000 offshore companies, names of real or ‘beneficial’ owners, and passport scans. There were bank statements. And email chains. Often these were between Mossack Fonseca’s head office in Panama and ‘intermediaries’, typically other lawyers, accountants and banks. And from the firm’s branches in UK crown dependencies li...
• There are of course many reasons for using an offshore company and of course owning one is not in itself a criminal offence. But the fact is that people often have recourse to an anonymous offshore company because they want to hide something – from the taxman, their ex-wife, their former business partner or the prying eyes of the public. That ‘some...
• Panama has always been an extremely dependent country. Having long been a poor province of Colombia, the country gained its independence in 1903 partly because American bankers and industrialists managed to persuade the then US president Theodore Roosevelt to support Panamanian separatists. US lobbies hoped to make money from the Panama Canal, whic...
• The lucrative business with shell companies is based on a law that came into force on 26 February 1927. This law – Law 32 – guarantees the secrecy of estates, money transfers and, most importantly, company owners, and offers so-called ‘sociedades anónimas’ exemption from taxation. This name sounds more mysterious than it actually is, because an ‘an...