Panama Papers

The Panama Papers (Spanish: Papeles de Panamá) are 11.5 million leaked documents (2.6 terabytes of data) published from April 3, 2016. The papers detail financial and attorney–client information for more than 214,488 offshore entities. These documents, some dating back to the 1970s, were created by, and taken from, the former Panamanian offshore law firm and corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca, and compiled with similar leaks into a searchable database.

The documents contain personal financial information about wealthy individuals and public officials previously private. Their publication made it possible to prosecute Jan Marsalek, a person of interest to a number of European governments and revealed his links with Russian intelligence, and international financial fraudster Harald Joachim von der Goltz. While offshore business entities are legal, reporters found that some of the Mossack Fonseca shell corporations were used for illegal purposes, including fraud, tax evasion, and evading international sanctions.

"John Doe", the whistleblower who leaked the documents to journalist Bastian Obermayer from the German national newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), remains anonymous, apparently even to the journalists who worked on the investigation. "My life is in danger", the whistleblower told them. In a document (released on May 6, 2016), Doe cited income inequality as the reason for the action and said the documents were leaked "simply because I understood enough about their contents to realize the scale of the injustices they described". Doe stated that he had never worked for any government or intelligence agency and expressed willingness to help prosecutors if granted immunity from prosecution.