The Pandora Files

[Brinda]

A2.94 terabyte data trove exposes the offshore secrets of wealthy elites from more than 200 countries and territories. These are people who use tax and secrecy havens to buy property and hide assets; many avoid taxes and worse. They include more than 330 politicians and 130 Forbes billionaires, as well as celebrities, fraudsters, drug dealers, royal family members and leaders of religious groups around the world.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists spent more than a year structuring, researching and analyzing the more than 11.9 million records in the Pandora Papers leak. The task involved three main elements: journalists, technology and time.

The investigation is based on a leak of confidential records of 14 offshore service providers that give professional services to wealthy individuals and corporations seeking to incorporate shell companies, trusts, foundations and other entities in low- or no-tax jurisdictions. The entities enable owners to conceal their identities from the public and sometimes from regulators. Often, the providers help them open bank accounts in countries with light financial regulation.

While some of the files date to the 1970s, most of those reviewed by ICIJ were created between 1996 and 2020. They cover a wide range of matters: the creation of shell companies, foundations and trusts; the use of such entities to purchase real estate, yachts, jets and life insurance; their use to make investments and to move money between bank accounts; estate planning and other inheritance issues; and the avoidance of taxes through complex financial schemes. Some documents are tied to financial crimes, including money laundering.

The more than 330 politicians exposed by the leak were from more than 90 countries and territories. They used entities in secrecy jurisdictions to buy real estate, hold money in trust, own other companies and other assets, sometimes anonymously.

The 11.9 million-plus records were largely unstructured. More than half of the files (6.4 million) were text documents, including more than 4 million PDFs, some of which ran to more than 10,000-pages. The documents included passports, bank statements, tax declarations, company incorporation records, real estate contracts and due diligence questionnaires. There were also more than 4.1 million images and emails in the leak.

The Pandora Papers gathered information on more than 27,000 companies and 29,000 so-called ultimate beneficial owners from 11 of the providers, or more than twice the number of beneficial owners identified in the Panama Papers.

In cases where information came in spreadsheet form, ICIJ removed duplicates and combined it into a master spreadsheet. For PDF or document files, ICIJ used programming languages such as Python to automate data extraction and structuring as much as possible.

After structuring the data, ICIJ used graphic platforms (Neo4J and Linkurious) to generate visualizations and make them searchable. This allowed reporters to explore connections between people and companies across providers.

To identify potential story subjects in the data, ICIJ matched information in the leak against other data sets: sanctions lists, previous leaks, public corporate records, media lists of billionaires and public lists of political leaders.

As a result, ICIJ identified more than 200 trusts settled, or created, in the U.S from 2000 to 2019, with the largest number registered in South Dakota. The trusts were connected with people from 40 countries (not including the U.S.). ICIJ identified assets in single trusts worth between $67,000 and $165 million held between 2000 and 2019. The data shows that U.S. trusts held assets worth a total of more than $1 billion. Those included U.S. real estate and bank accounts in Panama, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas and elsewhere.

To perform the analysis of U.S.-based trusts, ICIJ manually gathered information on the creators, known as settlors; the beneficiaries, and the assets held by the trusts. ICIJ was able to identify and gather data on trusts from 15 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

ICIJ used public records to verify details related to the companies and to be sure the people named in the data were actually the political leaders identified with those names. We found some false positives and discarded them. Among sources used in the research were the Dow Jones Risk and Compliance database, Sayari, Nexis, OpenCorporates, property records in the U.S and U.K., and public corporate records. More than 330 politicians and high level public officials, including 35 country leaders were confirmed.

Finally, the Pandora Papers investigation identified more than 500 BVI companies that had been clients of Mossack Fonseca, the law firm at the center of the Panama Papers scandal, and moved their business to other BVI providers in the aftermath whom we found in the data.

Some of the providers, based on their location and the jurisdictions where they do business, such as Cyprus, have a large proportion of Russian clients, the largest group by nationality in the Pandora Papers data.

In the Pandora Papers, more than 30% of the companies that received services from Demetrios A. Demetriades LLC, or DadLaw, a provider headquartered in Cyprus, had one or more Russians as beneficial owners. Similarly, more than 40% of the companies that received services from Seychelles-based Alpha Consulting Group, also had one or more Russians as beneficial owners. Alcogal and Fidelity Corporate Services Limited were also among the providers with the largest number of Russian clients.

A large proportion of beneficial owners appearing in the data are from Latin America. More than 90 of the more 330 politicians and public officials in the data are from Latin America. Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela are among the countries with the largest representation of beneficial owners. In the leaked data, Alcogal headquartered in Panama, has the largest group of Latin American clients.

When it comes to creating offshore companies, foundations and trusts, parties from different parts of the world and with different needs select different providers and jurisdictions for their shell companies.

As for U.S. nationals, ICIJ identified more than 700 companies with beneficial owners connected to the U.S. in the Pandora Papers; Americans were also among the top 20 nationalities represented in the data. In the Pandora Papers, Russia, the United Kingdom, Argentina, China and Brazil, are among the countries with the largest representation of beneficial owners.

The Pandora Papers are 11.9 million leaked documents with 2.9 terabytes of data that the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published beginning on 3 October 2021.[1][2][3] The leak exposed the secret offshore accounts of 35 world leaders, including current and former presidents, prime ministers, and heads of state as well as more than 100 business leaders, billionaires, and celebrities. The news organizations of the ICIJ described the document leak as their most expansive expos of financial secrecy yet, containing documents, images, emails and spreadsheets from 14 financial service companies, in nations including Panama, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.[4][5] The size of the leak surpassed their previous release of the Panama Papers in 2016, which had 11.5 million confidential documents and 2.6 terabytes of data.[6][7][8][9][10] The ICIJ said it is not identifying its source for the documents.[11]

In total, 35 current and former national leaders appear in the leak, alongside 400 public officials from nearly 100 countries and more than 100 billionaires.[14] Some of the activities were legal according to the country's tax laws. Some files were showing the date of 1970, but they were actually created between the years 1996 to 2020. The data included 130 billionaires listed by Forbes, over 330 politicians, celebrities, members of royal families and religious leaders. Among those names are former British prime minister Tony Blair, Chilean president Sebastin Piera, former Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta, Montenegrin president Milo Đukanović, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Qatari emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, United Arab Emirates prime minister and Dubai ruler Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Gabonese president Ali Bongo Ondimba, Lebanese prime minister Najib Mikati,[15] Ecuadorian president Guillermo Lasso, family members of former Argentine president Mauricio Macri and his spin-doctor, Ecuadorian Jaime Durn Barba,[16][17][18] and Cypriot president Nicos Anastasiades.[19][20] More than 100 billionaires, 29,000 offshore accounts, 30 current and former leaders, and 336 politicians[21] were named in the first leaks on 3 October 2021.[1][11]

King Abdullah II of Jordan is one of the main figures named in the papers, with documents showing he had invested over US$100 million in property across the US and UK, including houses in Malibu, California,[22] Washington, D.C., London and Ascot.[23][24] A UK company controlled by Cherie Blair was shown to have acquired a 6.45 million property in London by purchasing Romanstone International Limited, a British Virgin Islands company; had the property been acquired directly, 312,000 would have been payable in stamp duty. Tony Blair's name appears in a statement of joint income for the associated mortgage.[25]

An ICIJ report focused on the Panamanian law firm of Alemn, Cordero, Galindo & Lee, or Alcogal, saying it was the "law firm of the Latin American elite",[41] having created at least 14,000 shell companies and trusts in tax havens. Alcogal was thus mentioned more than any other offshore provider in the leaked documents.[42]

Pandora is an analysis framework designed to determine if a file is suspicious, conveniently displaying the results. Pandora provides a user-friendly content preview interface for large documents, including a preview of the metadata. This allows users to view files without the need to open them locally.

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