Top Highlights

• The rich, it turned out, had exited from the messy business of tax long ago.
• It included the records of 214,000 offshore companies, names of real or ‘beneficial’ owners, and passport scans.
• Ultimately, around 400 journalists from over eighty countries will be investigating stories originating from this data.
• Very soon we have over 50 gigabytes of data and several thousand digital folders stored on various USB sticks. Each folder bears a number associated with a particular offshore company. These folders obviously contain files that Mossack Fonseca drew up for the respective firm: certificates, passport copies, lists of shareholders and trustees, invoic...
• This is usually how it works. Contact is made with Mossfon (the common abbreviation for Mossack Fonseca) via an intermediary – for example a bank, a lawyer or an asset manager. These are Mossack Fonseca’s actual ‘clients’: they order the product, they handle communications and they pay the bills. The product is mainly an off-the-peg offshore compan...