Offshore jurisdictions tend to have no income or corporation taxes, which makes them potentially attractive to wealthy individuals and companies who don’t want to pay taxes in their home countries. Usually for reasons of tax, secrecy or regulation. By holding those assets in an offshore company, it is possible to hide from the rest of the world the identity of the person they actually belong to, or the “beneficial owner”. Companies registered offshore can be used to hold assets such as property, aircraft, yachts and investments in stocks and shares. Their clients are typically seeking to discreetly set up companies or trusts in lightly regulated tax havens such as the British Virgin Islands (BVI), Panama, the Cook Islands and the US state of South Dakota. The 14 offshore service providers in the leak provide corporate services to individuals or companies seeking to do business offshore. In the UK, the investigation has been led by the Guardian and BBC Panorama. In order to facilitate a global investigation, the ICIJ gave remote access to the documents to journalists in 117 countries, including reporters at the Washington Post, Le Monde, El País, Süddeutsche Zeitung, PBS Frontline and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The ICIJ, a Washington DC-based journalism nonprofit, is not identifying the source of the leaked documents.
Where did the Pandora documents come from? That makes it larger in volume than both the Panama papers (2016) and Paradise papers (2017), two previous offshore leaks. In total, the trove consists of 11.9m files leaked from a total of 14 offshore service providers, totalling 2.94 terabytes of information. The files were leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which shared access with the Guardian, BBC and other media outlets around the world. They provide a rare window into the hidden world of offshore finance, casting light on the financial secrets of some of the world’s richest people. The Pandora papers are the largest trove of leaked data exposing tax haven secrecy in history.
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