Whether it was funded by Soros, the CIA, the Rothschilds or even Putin is unclear, but moments ago the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists - the group responsible for preparing and organizing the Panama Papers leak - published a searchable database laying out 214,000 offshore entities created in 21 jurisdictions, from Nevada to Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands.
According to the ICIJ, "the data, part of the Panama Papers investigation, is the largest ever release of information about offshore companies and the people behind them. This includes, when available, the names of the real owners of those opaque structures."
The database also displays information about more than 100,000 additional offshore entities ICIJ had already disclosed in its 2013 Offshore Leaks investigation. ICIJ is publishing the information in the public interest.
The new data that ICIJ is now making public represents a fraction of the Panama Papers, a trove of more than 11.5 million leaked files from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, one of the world’s top creators of hard-to-trace companies, trusts and foundations.
ICIJ is not publishing the totality of the leak, and it is not disclosing raw documents or personal information en masse. The database contains a great deal of information about company owners, proxies and intermediaries in secrecy jurisdictions, but it doesn’t disclose bank accounts, email exchanges and financial transactions contained in the documents.
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On Friday, the anonymous leaker of the Panama Papers, known only as “John Doe,” spoke publicly for the first time in a written statement and called out for concrete steps to combat tax havens. “In the European Union, every member state’s corporate register should be freely accessible, with detailed data plainly available on ultimate beneficial owners,” the source wrote. Doe added that the US “can clearly no longer trust its fifty states to make sound decisions about their own corporate data.”
According to the ICIJ, the interactive application reveals more than 360,000 names of people and companies behind secret offshore structures. For those who wish to search the database, it is accessible after the jump (the only problem is that the server is so deluged with traffic it will likely 404 for the next several hours).
Finally, the ICIJ was quick to give the following disclaimer: "While the interactive application opens up a world that has never been shown in this much detail, not every owner of a company that appears in the Panama Papers shows up in the public database." Why?
This is because ownership information is often buried in emails, power-of-attorney letters and internal notes of Mossack Fonseca employees and cannot easily be extracted in a systematic manner. In addition, Mossack Fonseca often failed to collect the necessary information about the ultimate owners of companies, relying instead on banks and other intermediaries to keep track of that essential data.
Readers can search the full database below:
Even as a curious name not mentioned so far emerges:
Those who would rather play with the source data instead, can find it on the following 35.7MB torrent file.