OVER THE LAST 15 months, a network of investigative journalists from 46 countries — including the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism — had been hard at work verifying and validating data enrolled in 260 gigabytes of about 2.5 million files, including more than 2 million e-mails.
The subject matter of inquiry: 122,000 offshore companies or trusts, nearly 12,000 intermediaries (agents or “introducers”), and about 130,000 records on the people and agents who run, own, benefit from or hide behind offshore companies.”
The global investigative reporting project was led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) that is based out of Washington DC. But rather than just rush to upload the documents online, ICIJ thought it best to partner with journalists and media agencies to check out and verify first.
ICIJ collaborated with reporters from The Guardian and the BBC in the U.K., Le Monde in France, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Germany, The Washington Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and 31 other media partners around the world.
In all, “86 journalists from 46 countries used high-tech data crunching and shoe-leather reporting to sift through emails, account ledgers, and other files covering nearly 30 years.”
After all, the file was more than massive — “more than 160 times larger in size as measured in gigabytes than the U.S. State Department cables leaked to and published by WikiLeaks in 2010.”
Read Part 1 of the PCIJ’s report on “Offshore and Politicians in the Philippines”:
- Ferdinand Marcos’s daughter tied to offshore account in the Caribbean
Today, the massive outcome of the global investigation of offshore accounts goes public worldwide.
Excerpts from the ICIJ reports, “Secrecy for Sale: Inside the Global Offshore Money Maze,” follow:
“A cache of 2.5 million files has cracked open the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts, exposing hidden dealings of politicians, con men and the mega-rich the world over.
“The secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists lay bare the names behind covert companies and private trusts in the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands, and other offshore hideaways.
“They 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 labeled as a cog in Iran’s nuclear-development program.
“The leaked files provide facts and figures – cash transfers, incorporation dates, links between companies and individuals – that illustrate how offshore financial secrecy has spread aggressively around the globe, allowing the wealthy and the well-connected to dodge taxes and fueling corruption and economic woes in rich and poor nations alike. The records detail the offshore holdings of people and companies in more than 170 countries and territories…
“The vast flow of offshore money – legal and illegal, personal and corporate – can roil economies and pit nations against each other. Europe’s continuing financial crisis has been fueled by a Greek fiscal disaster exacerbated by offshore tax cheating and by a banking meltdown in the tiny tax haven of Cyprus, where local banks’ assets have been inflated by waves of cash from Russia.
“Anti-corruption campaigners argue that offshore secrecy undermines law and order and forces average citizens to pay higher taxes to make up for revenues that vanish offshore. The Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative, a program of the World Bank and the United Nations, has estimated that cross-border flows of global proceeds of financial crimes total between $1 trillion and $1.6 trillion a year.
“ICIJ’s 15-month investigation found that, alongside perfectly legal transactions, the secrecy and lax oversight offered by the offshore world allows fraud, tax dodging and political corruption to thrive.
Offshore patrons identified in the documents include:
- Individuals and companies linked to Russia’s Magnitsky Affair, a tax fraud scandal that has strained U.S.-Russia relations and led to a ban on Americans adopting Russian orphans.
- A Venezuelan deal maker accused of using offshore entities to bankroll a U.S.-based Ponzi scheme and funneling millions of dollars in bribes to a Venezuelan government official.
- A corporate mogul who won billions of dollars in contracts amid Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s massive construction boom even as he served as a director of secrecy-shrouded offshore companies owned by the president’s daughters.
- Indonesian billionaires with ties to the late dictator Suharto, who enriched a circle of elites during his decades in power.
“The documents also provide possible new clues to crimes and money trails that have gone cold.
“After learning ICIJ had identified the eldest daughter of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Maria Imelda Marcos Manotoc, as a beneficiary of a British Virgin Islands (BVI) trust, Philippine officials said they were eager to find out whether any assets in the trust are part of the estimated $5 billion her father amassed through corruption.
“Manotoc, a provincial governor in the Philippines, declined to answer a series of questions about the trust.”