Ten years after the Panama Papers exposed the offshore financial networks of world leaders and wealthy elites, legal proceedings stemming from the massive data leak continue to unfold in courtrooms worldwide.
On April 3, 2016, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung released 11.5 million documents from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. The leak revealed how politicians, business leaders, and celebrities used shell companies in tax havens to move and store wealth away from tax authorities.
More than 350 journalists from over 80 countries spent a year analyzing 2.6 terabytes of data in what became one of the largest collaborative journalism projects in history. The documents, spanning from the 1970s to 2016, identified about 214,000 offshore entities linked to individuals and companies across more than 200 countries.
We were continuously, for about six to eight months, just reading data. My team of three and I had a small cubicle to ourselves in the office, and we were cut off from the rest. Day and night, we were going through data, downloading documents onto our laptops and computers, which were all very secure, with restricted access. It was arduous work.
P Vaidyanathan Iyer, Managing Editor — The Indian Express
The immediate political fallout was swift and far-reaching. Iceland's Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson resigned after nationwide protests when revelations showed he and his wife owned shell companies in the British Virgin Islands. Pakistan's Supreme Court dismissed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 2017, leading to his conviction on corruption charges and a ten-year prison sentence plus $10.6 million fine.