The Panama Papers

Three tips for searching the Offshore Leaks database

Mon, 23 May 2016 16:45:00 -0400

The ICIJ Offshore Leaks database allows you to search through almost 320,000 offshore companies and trusts - more than 200,000 were registered by the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, whose inner workings were exposed in the Panama Papers, and 100,000 entities incorporated through Portcullis Trustnet and Commonwealth Trust Limited, two offshore service providers exposed as part of the 2013 ICIJ Offshore Leaks investigation.

The Offshore Leaks database offers users multiple ways to explore the data, including searching by names or keywords, looking for country-specific connections, or browsing offshore entities by jurisdiction.

Find a specific person or company

Let’s say you researching property ownership in a city like London, and come across an offshore company listed as an owner of a £750,000 commercial building in the British Land Registry. The registry does not tell you who is actually behind “Moonlight Estates Limited.”

But the Offshore Leaks database might be able to help. Start by typing the “Moonlight Estates” into the search box and hit “Search.” Typing only the first part of the company name will show partial matches, so it won’t matter if “Limited” is spelled “Ltd” or “Ltd.” in the data. As a general rule, we encourage you to try different spellings when looking for a person of a company.

The results page returns one company named “Moonlight Estates Limited,” connected to Ecuador and registered in the British Virgin Islands. Had the results page returned several companies with the name “Moonlight Estates Limited,” you could have filtered by jurisdiction, for example by clicking on “British Virgin Islands” in the right menu.

Clicking on the company’s name will lead you to a page with more information about that company and who’s behind it. In addition to basic information about the company, you’ll also see an interactive visualization that allows you to explore the connections between this company and related addresses, shareholders, beneficiaries, and more. There’s also a text list of ;these connections, and links out to OpenCorporates (for additional corporate data).

Take a look at the visualization and you’ll see that the shareholder and beneficiary of “Moonlight Estates Limited” is actually Ayad H. Allawi, the former prime minister of Iraq.

Clicking on the beneficiary node shows the address connected to Allawi, which enables you to check if it is indeed the former prime minister. Clicking on the shareholder node shows you another company for which Allawi is a listed shareholder, “Foxwood Estates Limited.”

If you check the British Land Registry, you can see that Foxwood Estates Limited owns a townhouse worth £2.75m in Kensington. Clicking on Foxwood Estates Limited in the visualization will reveal that another director for this company is “Ayad Allawi” (without an H), also connected to another company.

Of course if you already knew that Allawi was in the Panama Papers data, you could also have found his name by typing it into the search box. On the database’s landing page select the “Search by country” tab (the “Search by jurisdiction” tab is for company searches only, not for individuals), type in “Ayad Allawi” and click “Search.”

The results page lists all the officers with that name. From the results page you can already see which countries those officers are connected to.

When you click on the name, you get information and a visualization showing the connections between Ayad Allawi and different addresses and offshore entities. Clicking on the different nodes will enable you to find all the information you previously found by starting by the company search.

One final tip when searching for a specific name: ICIJ is publishing the names as they were typed in the leaked records. This means that there could be multiple spellings or even misspellings in how names are listed. We encourage you to try different spellings.

Find all the names connected to a country

ICIJ connected the names of people and offshore entities in the database to more than 200 countries and territories through their listed addresses. This way, if a person is the beneficial owner of a company and is connected to an address in France, the person will appear if you search for all the names associated with France.

To do that, make sure you are in the tab entitled “Search by country.” Open the drop down menu by clicking on “All countries” and select the country you are looking for, in this case France. Leave the search box blank and hit “Search.”

The search results are displayed in sections: you can see the offshore entities (these are the companies, trusts, foundations and more), the officers (which includes directors, shareholders and/or beneficiaries), intermediaries (the lawyers and service providers who help set up or act as the registered agents for the offshore companies), and the addresses connected to that country.

In the case of offshore entities, you can also add a second filter to just see companies from a specific jurisdiction. Select the jurisdiction from the list in the right menu. For example, if you search for “France” and then filter by the jurisdiction “Bahamas,” you will see all the companies connected to France that are registered in the Bahamas.

If you select the filter “Officers,” you’ll be able to see all the persons connected to France. For example former minister Jérôme Cahuzac.

Clicking on his name will reveal that he is connected to the company “Cerman Group Limited” in the Panama Papers data.

Browse by jurisdiction

Is there a particular tax haven or secrecy jurisdiction you’re curious about? You can browse all the companies registered in one of 38 jurisdictions included in our data using the “Search by jurisdictions” tab on the homepage of the database. Click on the tab, then select the jurisdiction you are looking for from the dropdown menu. Leave the search box blank and hit “Search.”

You can browse the list of offshore entities, and can click through to find out more information about their offshore connections.

You can also switch between the jurisdictions using the “Filter by jurisdiction” menu on the right menu. Visit our special Panama Papers blog post for more information about how secretive some of these jurisdictions.

We encourage you to be careful when describing the information contained in this database. There are legitimate uses for offshore companies and trusts and we do not intend to suggest or imply that any persons, companies or other entities have broken the law or otherwise acted improperly. In addition, many people and entities have the same or similar names. We suggest you confirm the identities of any individuals or entities located in the database based on addresses or other identifiable information.

In addition to using the online Offshore Leaks database, you can also download the full dataset and explore all the data on your computer. We are making the raw data available for download here.

ICIJ has been investigating the offshore economy for more than four years and we’re going to keep digging into these leaked files. We welcome any tips you may find searching this database, please send them to us here. If you wish to use a more secure method to contact us or want to share sensitive information, please consider using an alternative method, such as encrypted email or Secure Drop. More details are available here.

ICIJ releases database revealing thousands of secret offshore companies

Mon, 09 May 2016 13:45:00 -0400

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists publishes today a searchable database that strips away the secrecy of nearly 214,000 offshore entities created in 21 jurisdictions, from Nevada to Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands.

The data, part of the Panama Papers investigation, is the largest ever release of information about offshore companies and the people behind them. This includes, when available, the names of the real owners of those opaque structures.

The database also displays information about more than 100,000 additional offshore entities ICIJ had already disclosed in its 2013 Offshore Leaks investigation.

ICIJ is publishing the information in the public interest.

The new data that ICIJ is now making public represents a fraction of the Panama Papers, a trove of more than 11.5 million leaked files from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, one of the world’s top creators of hard-to-trace companies, trusts and foundations.

ICIJ is not publishing the totality of the leak, and it is not disclosing raw documents or personal information en masse. The database contains a great deal of information about company owners, proxies and intermediaries in secrecy jurisdictions, but it doesn’t disclose bank accounts, email exchanges and financial transactions contained in the documents.

In all, the interactive application reveals more than 360,000 names of people and companies behind secret offshore structures. As the data are from leaked sources and not a standardized registry, there may be some duplication of names.

The data was originally obtained from an anonymous source by reporters at the German newspaper Süeddeustche Zeitung, who asked ICIJ to organize a global reporting collaboration to analyze the files.

More than 370 reporters in nearly 80 countries probed the files for a year. Their investigations uncovered the secret offshore holdings of 12 world leaders, more than 128 other politicians and scores of fraudsters, drug traffickers and other criminals whose companies had been blacklisted in the US and elsewhere.

Their status as outlaws or public officials didn’t prevent them from obtaining shell companies in locales where secrecy laws often make it impossible for prosecutors and other investigators to trace their assets.

The files revealed, for example, that associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin secretly shuffled as much as $2 billion through banks and shadow companies.

The reaction to the Panama Papers was immediate and viral.

Outraged citizens took to the streets in Reykjavik, Malta and London while the hashtag #panamapapers trended on Twitter for days after the story broke on April 3. The prime minister of Iceland resigned over the British Virgin Islands company he co-owned with his wife, while other world leaders scrambled to explain their secret holdings. It took UK’s Prime Minister David Cameron three days to publicly acknowledge he had profited from an investment fund, created by his father, that was incorporated in Panama and managed in the Bahamas. In Spain a minister resigned after being caught in a series of lies about his connections to offshore, and in Uruguay police arrested five individuals suspected of laundering money for a powerful Mexican drug cartel.

The Panama Papers underscore the fundamental injustices and inequalities created by the offshore system, media commentators and political leaders say.

“When taxes are evaded, when state assets are taken and put into these havens, all of these things can have a tremendous negative effect on our mission to end poverty and boost prosperity,” Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank, said as he opened the spring meetings of the World Bank and IMF in Washington soon after ICIJ and more than 100 other news organizations began revealing the results of the media collaboration’s investigation.

President Barack Obama, meanwhile, pointed out that the biggest problem was that many of the schemes revealed by the Panama Papers were legal. “It’s not that they’re breaking the laws, it’s that the laws are so poorly designed,” he said.

The revelations reignited the debate about the need for public registries in which information about who ultimately controls a company be accessible to all. The UK has made disclosure of beneficial owner data mandatory and public, but British overseas territories such the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands, some of the busiest offshore havens, have agreed to share that information only when it is requested by law enforcement.

Citing the Panama Papers, the US government also announced Thursday that it has sent legislation to Congress to create a centralized federal registry of the actual owners of any newly created company. The registry would help law enforcement authorities ferret out the real people behind anonymous companies used in money laundering and other wrongdoing.

The governments of Australia and Germany have said that they too intend to create public registries of company owners.

On Friday, the anonymous leaker of the Panama Papers, known only as “John Doe,” spoke publicly for the first time in a written statement and called out for concrete steps to combat tax havens. “In the European Union, every member state’s corporate register should be freely accessible, with detailed data plainly available on ultimate beneficial owners,” the source wrote. Doe added that the US “can clearly no longer trust its fifty states to make sound decisions about their own corporate data.”

The searchable database that ICIJ publishes today allows users to explore the networks of companies and people that used – and sometimes abused – the secrecy of offshore locales with the help of Mossack Fonseca and other intermediaries. The leaked data covers nearly 40 years, from 1977 through the end of 2015.

The data, which includes postal addresses, displays links to more than 200 countries and territories, from China to Chile. Users can filter the information by country and by offshore jurisdiction. They can also explore the role of banks, law firms and other gatekeepers of the financial system in facilitating the creation of offshore companies for high net worth individuals. For the first time, they can see details about shadowy Panamanian private foundations, including when available information about who controls them.

While the interactive application opens up a world that has never been shown in this much detail, not every owner of a company that appears in the Panama Papers shows up in the public database. This is because ownership information is often buried in emails, power-of-attorney letters and internal notes of Mossack Fonseca employees and cannot easily be extracted in a systematic manner. In addition, Mossack Fonseca often failed to collect the necessary information about the ultimate owners of companies, relying instead on banks and other intermediaries to keep track of that essential data.

Still, it is expected that Panama Papers revelations will continue to surface as regulators and ordinary citizens from around the globe probe the newly available data and find new connections that may have escaped reporters. Concerned citizens are encouraged to share tips with ICIJ and the Panama Papers journalists who continue to investigate the documents. The full dataset is also available for download.

“Transparency is not going to move backward,” Kim said in his World Bank spring meetings remarks, warning that those trying to avoid taxes or steal money from public treasuries should be “very careful” because they will eventually be tracked down. “The world is only going to become more and more transparent as we move forward.”

Cartoonists around the world tell the Panama Papers story

Thu, 05 May 2016 17:00:00 -0400

After the publication of the Panama Papers investigation, cartoonists all over the world took to their drawing boards to visualize their interpretations of the revelations. Here is a selection of their work:

Wrangling 2.6TB of data: The people and the technology behind the Panama Papers

Mon, 25 Apr 2016 17:00:00 -0400

The trove of files that make up the Panama Papers is likely the largest dataset of leaked insider information in the history of journalism.

For ICIJ’s Data and Research Unit, it offered a unique set of challenges. The overall size of the data (2.6 terabytes, 11.5 million files), the variety of file types (from spreadsheets, emails and PDFs to obscure and old formats no longer in use), and the logistics of making it all securely searchable for more than 370 journalists around the world are just a few of the hurdles faced over the course of the 12 month investigation.

ICIJ member and data unit leader Mar Cabra recently spoke with journalism tech site Source about the people, the technology and the data journalism behind the Panama Papers. This post is republished with their kind permission.

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So, very first thing, ICIJ has said that it will release a batch of data later this spring, but not the entire dataset—could you say a little about that, and about the way you’re timing the reporting?

The plan is that we’re actually going to keep reporting – some partners are publishing for almost two weeks for sure. Then in early May we’re going to release all the names connected to more than 200,000 offshore companies – so we’re talking about the beneficiaries, the directories, the shareholders, the intermediaries, and the addresses connected to those entities in 21 jurisdictions. We expect to have some bang around that, too.

But we’re not going to release all 11.5 million files, we’re going to release the structured data, which is the internal Mossack Fonseca database. This is especially valuable because tax havens sell secrecy, and their secrecy relies mainly on the fact that corporate registries are opaque and not accessible, so we think there’s a great public value in releasing the names of companies and who’s behind them.

We already did this is June 2013 in the Offshore Leaks database that you can access right now. We had a leak then similar to what we had now — we had internal documents and data from two offshore service providers, which is basically what Mossack does. The only difference now is that this leak includes much more information and is much bigger, and the clients are high-level clients, so that’s why this leak is very important. We’re going to merge the two databases and all of them are going to be put together at the Offshore Leaks URL. You’ll be able to search what could amount to the biggest public database of offshore companies ever.

Data forensics

What was it like to work with the leaked data? What kind of processing did you have to do?

Working with this data has been challenging for many different reasons. The first reason is, it’s huge — we’re talking about 2.6TB. The second reason is that it didn’t all come at the same time; we didn’t receive a 2.6TB hard drive. We had to deal with incremental information, and we also had to deal with a lot of images. The majority of the files are emails and database files. There are also a lot of PDFs and TIFFs, so we have to do a lot of OCR-ing for millions of documents.

So first, most of the leak was unstructured data. Second, it was not easy working with the structured data. The Mossack Fonseca internal database didn’t come to us in the raw, original format, unfortunately. We had to do reverse-engineering to reconstruct the database, and connect the dots based on codes that the documents had.

We’ve had to do that with every leak we’ve received: We had to do it with Offshore Leaks in 2013, we had to do it with Swiss Leaks last year, and we had to do it again this year. Our programmer, Rigoberto Carvajal, is a true magician, because he has become an expert in reverse-engineering databases. He and Miguel Fiandor reverse-engineered the database, reconstructed the Mossack Fonseca internal files, and put it into a graphed-database format. And that’s the base of what we’re going to be doing in the new Offshore Leaks database – the improved version.

The tech stack

We believe in open source technology and try to use it as much as possible. We used Apache Solr for the indexing and Apache Tika for document processing, and it’s great because it processes dozens of different formats and it’s very powerful. Tika interacts with Tesseract, so we did the OCRing on Tesseract.

To OCR the images, we created an army of 30–40 temporary servers in Amazon that allowed us to process the documents in parallel and do parallel OCR-ing. If it was very slow, we’d increase the number of servers — if it was going fine, we would decrease because of course those servers have a cost.

Then we put the data up, but the problem with Solr was it didn’t have a user interface, so we used Project Blacklight, which is open source software normally used by librarians. We used it for the journalists. It’s simple because it allows you to do faceted search — so, for example, you can facet by the folder structure of the leak, by years, by type of file. There were more complex things — it supports queries in regular expressions, so the more advanced users were able to search for documents with a certain pattern of numbers that, for example, passports use. You could also preview and download the documents. ICIJ open-sourced the code of our document processing chain, created by our web developer Matthew Caruana Galizia.

We also developed a batch-searching feature. So say you were looking for politicians in your country, you just run it through the system, and you upload your list to Blacklight and you would get a CSV back saying yes, there are matches for these names — not only exact matches, but also matches based on proximity. So you would say “I want Mar Cabra proximity 2” and that would give you “Mar Cabra,” “Mar whatever Cabra,” “Cabra, Mar,” — so that was good, because very quickly journalists were able to see… I have this list of politicians and they are in the data!

For the visualization of the Mossack Fonseca internal database, we worked with another tool called Linkurious. It’s not open source, it’s licensed software, but we have an agreement with them, and they allowed us to work with it. It allows you to represent data in graphs. We had a version of Linkurious on our servers, so no one else had the data. It was pretty intuitive — journalists had to click on dots that expanded, basically, and could search the names.

We had the data in a relational database format in SQL, and thanks to ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) software Talend, we were able to easily transform the data from SQL to Neo4j (the graph-database format we used). Once the data was transformed, it was just a matter of plugging it into Linkurious, and in a couple of minutes, you have it visualized in a networked way, so anyone can log in from anywhere in the world. That was another reason we really liked Linkurious and Neo4j — they’re very quick when representing graph data, and the visualizations were easy to understand for everybody. The not-very-tech-savvy reporter could expand the docs like magic, and more technically expert reporters and programmers could use the Neo4j query language, Cypher, to do more complex queries, like show me everybody within two degrees of separation of this person, or show me all the connected dots…

We’re already using the graphs from Linkurious and the database in the interactive The Power Players, which shows more than 70 politicians. Every time you see a graph in the interactive, that’s the database. Linkurious has a great feature, which is that you can make calls to the API, so we make calls to the API to draw the data from this new database. It also has a built-in widget feature, so if you’re using Linkurious for your reporting and you’d like a graph, you create a widget, publish the widget and embed it in your story, and it’s interactive — you can move the nodes around and display any kind of info panel… It’s great because we didn’t have to work on any of that ourselves.

We’re really happy with Linkurious — they were super supportive. Whenever we asked them questions, or asked for a feature we needed, two days later it was implemented! That communication was great, it was like having an expanded development team.

For communication, we have the Global I-Hub, which is a platform based on open source software called Oxwall. Oxwall is a social network, like Facebook, which has a wall when you log in with the latest in your network — it has forum topics, links, you can share files, and you can chat with people in real time.

Oxwall is designed for people who want to have a social network — in the form for user registration, one of the options we had to disable was “Are you looking for a male or for a female?” So… that we disabled, because of course it was a bit confusing! We repurposed it to use it for sharing and social networking around investigative reporting, and thanks to a grant from the Knight Prototype Fund, we improved the security around Oxwall and implemented two-step authentication on the I-Hub.

That was a bit of a nightmare, because some reporters didn’t quite get it, and there were a lot of problems, but we did two-step authentication using Google Authenticator. In the end, everybody got it! We were worried because we were working with journalists in developing countries, and we worried that maybe some reporters wouldn’t have a smartphone, but we were lucky and we didn’t have that problem.

Everybody was using the platform to communicate and log in every day or several times every week and share the tips and exchange ideas, and when somebody found a cross-border connection… One day a colleague of ICIJ in Spain was like, “Oh my god, I found [football player Lionel] Messi!” And everybody’s like “Oh my god, Messi!”

We knew we had things connected to FIFA and to UEFA, we knew there were soccer players, we knew that sports and offshore were intimately connected, but it’s at that point that’s it’s so useful because he says “Oh my god I found Messi!” and all of a sudden everybody has Messi and everybody’s covering Messi. The communication was very important.

A platform three years in the making

We had already used many of these platforms before. We really have three types of platforms: the Global I-Hub for communication, the combination of Solr and Blacklight, and Linkurious.

We had already used previous versions of the communication platform, but it’s not until we did the Knight Prototype that we improved its security, and this was the first time we had put it into practice. We were using Oxwall in our previous investigations — in Luxembourg Leaks, which was published in November 2014, we were already using Oxwall. But Oxwall, again — it’s a social networking platform to meet people that had to be improved. We got the Knight Prototype Fund and started work mid–2014 — it took us six months, and then a bit more than six months because in the end there are tricks you want to do. At that point, we’re at the beginning of 2015, and publishing the Swiss Leaks data and investigation. And then a year ago in April we got the call from Süddeutsche Zeitung. We were testing the platform at that time with ICIJ members, and then saw the perfect opportunity in this project to put it to work.

The other two platforms we had already used in Swiss Leaks, but we’ve improved them. The biggest problem was all the file formats that we had. Before, we had used Blacklight and Solr with all PDFs or all XLS files, but in here, you cannot imagine! There are formats I’ve never heard of, there are things you can’t even find in Google. We got around 99% of the data OCRed and indexed — I think that’s amazing given the great variety of formats that we encountered.

I think something that is very important to have in mind is that my users, who are journalists, range from the super-techie reporter who has covered the Snowden files, knows everything about encryption, and works with a great developer, to the other side of the spectrum, the very good traditional investigative reporter who has sources and is great at digging into documents and talking to people but has a hard time dealing with technology. So every tool we produce and use has to cover both fronts. We have to go for simple tools that also allow for more complex work.

The team behind the data

There’s something important to know about ICIJ: we’re a very small team. I’ve been working with ICIJ since 2011. I’m from Spain, and I studied at Columbia doing investigative reporting and data journalism there, and ICIJ hired me to come back to Spain and work here. When I started in 2011, ICIJ had a team of four people, and the team expanded or not depending on the project — we hired contractors. Back then, we didn’t have any in-house data capabilities.

After Offshore Leaks in 2013, and especially after the release of the Offshore Leaks database in June of 2013, which we did in cooperation with La Nación in Costa Rica, they had a very good data team that had two great programmers, and a great leader, Giannina Segnini. At that point, we realized, oh my god, we need to stop doing this externally! We need to have experts and developers in-house that work with us. I had been specializing on data journalism, so when we made that decision, it became evident that I was a good fit to lead the team. Giannina had left her position at La Nación to teach at Columbia, and the two programmers on her team, Rigoberto Carvajal and Matthew Caruana Galizia, came to work with us, and we started a data team at ICIJ. ICIJ today has 12 staff members and the Data and Research unit is half of the total staff. We have four developers and three journalists. Emilia Díaz Struck, a great data-oriented researcher, is the research editor, and I lead the team.

I’m not a programmer, I’m a journalist who discovered data journalism at Columbia University back in 2009, 2010 — I thought if I could tell stories in a systematic way, it was much better than telling random stories of random victims. I’ve been pushing for data journalism in Spain, and I co-created the first-ever Master’s degree in Spain on investigative reporting, data journalism, and visualization. With a colleague, I also created Jornadas Periodismo de Datos “the NICAR conference of Spain” — it’s an annual data journalism conference for around 500 people trying to learn about data. So I’m very tuned into data, and I’m a data journalist myself — not from a developer background, but I have great developers on my team.

One thing that is very important with this work is trust. So whenever we hire somebody, it has to be someone who’s been highly recommended by colleagues and people we know, because we cannot trust this data to just anybody. We have to have references from very close people when dealing with this.

An alliance built on trust

Q. So, speaking of trust, there is this central mystery to me about this project — how did you keep it secret for all this time, with so many people working on it around the world?

I have to say, I’m amazed myself that we haven’t had any major problems with this, but it makes me believe in the human race, because it’s really about trust. That’s why choosing and picking the team is so important. We need media organizations that want to collaborate, we need journalists that we can trust and that follow the agreement. Every person that joins the project needs to sign an agreement saying they’re going to respect the embargo and we’re all going to go out at the same time. And the journalists who have worked with us before know that it’s for their own benefit, to keep it quiet, because if we all publish at the same time, there’s a big bang. But if there’s a leak, it loses that power.

And you just have to look at the impact, you know? If we had not published all together at the same time in more than 100 media organizations, it would not have been the same! Here in Spain, the two media organizations we work with were amazed about the world reaction. But again, it’s all about trust.

My boss, Marina Walker Guevara, always says that this is like bringing guests to a dinner party. You need to choose the ones who are not going to cause trouble, the ones who are going to have a nice conversation. If you know that two of them don’t get along very well, you seat them on opposite sides of the table.

To me, it’s the most amazing thing — it may sound harsh, but it makes me believe in humans, in us, in our power as individuals and the power we can achieve working together. And I think that’s the way to go. There’s no way we could have analyzed 11.5 million files, 2.6 TB of information without a collaborative effort.

The future of leak reporting

Q. So what happens after the Panama Papers?

Something we’ve realized is that journalists are starting to get big collections of documents on their computers. So for example, in Argentina, journalists had all the official gazettes of Argentina and some other documents, and they have these big searchable database of documents. In Switzerland, they had the same thing — they had a lot of documents from their investigation all in one place. Right now, they have to download the documents from us and feed them into their system to see if there are connections. We want to get the platforms of the media organizations and our platforms to talk to each other and do massive matches. Right now we were only able to do targeted searches or searches through spreadsheets, and the next step is to get collections of documents talking to each other.

In parallel with the Panama Papers, ICIJ is already working on DataShare, something we presented for a Knight News Challenge grant. We didn’t get the money, so we’re funding it through other means — the Open Society Foundations have given us some money to work on it, and we’re looking for more funding.

So we’re actually working on a program that they’ll be able to install on their computers in, like, “Tabula mode,” right? So as with Tabula, you install it on your computer. It works in your browser, and it allows you to extract the entities in your documents. What you share with the network are the entities in your documents, and then our search engine basically does the matches using fuzzy matching between the entities. It tells you if there’s somebody else across the network with the same entities, and then you two have to get together and start talking to share the documents.

So we need big collections of documents to talk to each other, and we’re trying to solve that at the level of the entities, because journalists don’t want to share everything they have — they have exclusive documents. But if you create an index of entities in their documents, it’s not so much of a problem, and everybody can benefit from those matches. And of course, we’re having a lot of headaches with natural language processing, and that’s something we’re dealing with inside the Panama Papers project as well.

Q. Do you already have your next data project in view?

Yes! We have a team working on the next project, and scoping it — we have a few themes and we’re seeing which of the themes is the next one.

VIDEO: One source, 370+ journalists - behind the scenes of the Panama Papers

Mon, 11 Apr 2016 20:00:00 -0400

More than 370 journalists worked on the Panama Papers, a 12 month investigation that covered almost 80 countries and involved more than 100 media organizations. This film, from German broadcaster and ICIJ partner NDR, takes you behind the scenes of the investigation and shows how reporters tackled the story across three different continents.

Contested Modigliani seized from freeport as Swiss open investigation

Mon, 11 Apr 2016 12:00:00 -0400

The Geneva public prosecutor has confirmed a criminal investigation is underway after authorities searched the Geneva Freeport for a contested painting by Amadeo Modigliani, details of which were revealed in the Panama Papers.

The Modigliani painting, known as “Seated Man with a Cane,” was being stored in the freeport facility until it was seized by authorities following a search last week.

The painting, which may be worth as much as $25 million, is at the center of a legal battle between the estate of a Jewish art dealer and an art dynasty controlled by David Nahmad.

The Nahmads have insisted in federal and state court in New York that the family does not possess the Modigliani. An offshore company called International Art Center, registered by a little-known Panamanian law firm, does.

But according to the Panama Papers investigation, the Nahmad family has controlled the Panama-based company, International Art Center, for more than 20 years, and David Nahmad, the family leader, has been the company’s sole owner since January 2014.

According to the Swiss newspaper Le Temps, the prosecutor’s office conducted a search of the premises of the art storage company Rodolphe Haller, which has already told the U.S. court that it was storing the painting on behalf of IAC.

On Monday, a spokesan for the prosecutor’s office confirmed an investigation had been opened and the painting had been seized.

'We're' not going to stop,' Mossack Fonseca tell reporters

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 19:30:00 -0400

Mossack Fonseca co-founder Jurgen Mossack yesterday claimed he was surprised to learn that clients of his firm had ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and the current and former members of China’s Communist Party Politburo Standing Committee.

Mossack told CNBC television in an interview that his firm does not regularly monitor the actions of companies it has helped set up for clients. Had Mossack Fonseca & Co. been aware of such connections, “normally in a case like that we would resign, we would stop dealing with that client and with that company,” he said.

It was one of a handful of interviews that Mossack and his partner Ramon Fonseca have given since the publication of the Panama Papers, an investigation into the leaked files of the firm.

Mossack said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that the firm would continue forward. “We’re not going to stop the services and go plant bananas or something,” he said. “People do make mistakes. So do we, and so does our compliance department. But that is not the norm.”

One question that has been raised since the publication of the Panama Papers has been about the relative absence of rich and powerful Americans. Fonseca told the Associated Press in an interview that their law firm has only a handful of American clients, most of whom were members of Panama’s growing expatriate retirement community. It’s not out of any anti-Americanism or fear of the Internal Revenue, according to the AP.

In other developments, U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown wrote Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew seeking assurances that Treasury is investigating “any potential involvement of U.S. or U.S.-linked banks, financial services institutions, or other companies or individuals with Mossack Fonseca & Co.” They mentioned as a particular concern “whether companies or individuals involved with or utilizing the services of this firm may have facilitated money laundering or terrorist financing.

UK leader under pressure over Panama Papers links, as Panama pledges transparency boost

Thu, 07 Apr 2016 18:30:00 -0400

British Prime Minister David Cameron admitted that he had profited from an offshore fund set up by his father and marketed as managed in a way to be exempt from U.K. taxes.

Cameron, whose office had issued previous statements saying neither he nor his wife and children were currently profiting from the fund, nor would they in the future, disclosed that he had profited in the past.

Cameron said in an April 7, 2016 interview with ITV that he had sold his 5,000 stake in the Blairmore Investment Trust, named after his family’s estate, just months before he took office in May, 2010, making a profit of £31,500. Pressure had been mounting on Cameron since the disclosure of his father’s offshore fund in the Panama Papers April 3 and had grown as his office released what appeared to be narrowly worded statements.

In 2013, Cameron had urged his country’s overseas territories — including the British Virgin Islands — to work with him in the fight against tax evasion and offshore secrecy.

British regulators, meanwhile have given banks and financial institutions till just April 15 to disclose any dealings they have had with the Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca, which was at the center the Panama Papers investigation into the inner workings of the offshore financial secrecy industry.

United Kingdom regulators wrote approximately 20 firms to ask about “any significant issues or relationships identified.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke publicly for the first time in response to the Panama Papers investigation, only to dismiss the findings as an “attempt to destabilize the internal situation” in Russia.

Speaking at a media forum in St Petersburg, he told reporters that his longtime friend Sergey Roldugin, who was linked in the Panama Papers to $2 billion in offshore transactions, had done nothing wrong, and had spent his money on “acquiring musical instruments.”

In the United States, a Securities and Exchange Commission official said the agency will review the investigation for possible information about wrongdoing, and officials at the U.S. Treasury used attention generated by the Panama Papers to highlight its own efforts to close a loophole in federal disclosure requirements that has allowed the actual owners of offshore companies to remain unknown.

Banks and financial institutions are currently required to know the identity of customers who open accounts in the U.S. but not the identity of owners of shell companies that open accounts. Treasury’s proposed “customer due diligence” rule, which has been in the works for a long time, would change that.

“I don’t think everyone recognizes the connection between the C.D.D. [consumer due diligence] and the Panama Papers,” Jennifer Shasky Calvery, director of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Center told the New York Times. The proposed rule would require banks to know the identities of anyone who owns 25 percent or more of a corporation that opens a bank account or who exercises control of the corporation. That’s a higher standard. “Who is actually calling the shots? Who stands to gain?” she said.

Also in reaction to the investigation, Panama President Juan Carlos Varela said the government will create an international committee of experts to recommend improvements in transparency in the offshore financial industry and that the committee would share its findings with other nations in the interest of taking joint action.

And tax officials in Mexico said they would look at information related to 33 Mexican nationals mentioned in documents related to the investigation to see whether income from offshore activities was properly reported.

Frequently asked questions about ICIJ and the Panama Papers

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 19:00:00 -0400

Why didn’t ICIJ publish all the Panama Papers files?

We are an investigative journalism organization and, as such, we report stories that are in the public interest. The Panama Papers expose significant systemic failures inside the offshore economy. They reveal how politicians, banks, criminals and sports celebrities have taken advantage of the secrecy provided by tax havens and, in some cases, broken the law. Those stories and others we are pursuing serve the public interest by bringing accountability to the offshore industry – an industry that has long operated in the shadows.

Other parts of the data are of a private nature and of no interest to the public.

ICIJ will not release personal data en masse but will continue to mine the full data with its media partners.

Will ICIJ at least publish a database of people and companies?

In early May ICIJ will release the names of the more than 214,000 offshore entities incorporated by Mossack Fonseca and the people connected to them (as beneficiaries, shareholders or directors).

The names – with links to more than 200 countries – will be added to the Offshore Leaks database (published in 2013), which already contains more than 100,000 paper companies that ICIJ obtained in a previous leak. The exact release date will be confirmed soon. Sign up to our mailing list to be the first to know.

Will ICIJ share documents from the Panama Papers with governments?

The long-standing policy of ICIJ, and our parent organization, the Center for Public Integrity, is not to turn over such material.

The ICIJ is not an arm of law enforcement and is not an agent of the government. We are an independent reporting organization, served by and serving our members, the global investigative journalism community and the public.

Should I assume that everyone that appears in the Panama Papers is involved in tax avoidance or evasion?

No. There are legitimate reasons to create a company in an offshore jurisdiction and many people declare them to their tax authorities when that is required.

How can I join the investigation?

Once we have finished publishing a planned series of stories with our partners our attention will turn to countries where we still have investigative work to do. A number of other media organizations have reached out to us offering help and support, and we welcome these new offers of collaboration. We are vetting the requests and plan to pick a few new partners in the coming weeks.

This is not easy data to understand. It took great commitment from all of our current media partners to find stories of important public interest. ICIJ’s data unit provided training to our partners to make sure that everyone understood the intricacies of the information they were reporting on.

If you are a journalist and want to partner with us send us an email to data@icij.org.

How does ICIJ pick its reporting partners?

ICIJ is an independent network of nearly 200 investigative journalists in more than 65 countries who work together of issues of global significance. Sometimes we go to our members with an idea for a project and sometimes our members come to us with their own ideas or data. The the Panama Papers investigation, ICIJ members Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier from the German newspaper Süeddeutsche Zeitung shared the files they had obtained with ICIJ so we could organize a global investigation.

We sometimes work with journalists and media organizations that are not part of our network, for example in countries where we haven’t done work before. We vet those new partners thoroughly. What do we seek in our partners? 1) Journalists with a proven record in investigative reporting 2) Media organizations that support “slow,” deep-dive investigations 3) Journalists who are team players and are willing to share their work with other colleagues around the world 4) Generally nice people (life is short!).

How do I get in touch with ICIJ if I want to share a tip or documents?

There are a number of ways to contact ICIJ, depending on the nature of your message or the material you would like to share.

ICIJ also uses PGP encryption: our public key can be found on the MIT PGP Public Key Server (fingerprint: 986A 572D 3B95 BD42 331E 839A B532 F18C 2A17 696B); our email address is contact@icij.org.

Who funds ICIJ?

ICIJ is a non-profit organization. We rely heavily on charitable foundations and on financial support from the public. We do not take funding from governments. Without our readers’ support, we cannot exist.

Recent ICIJ funders include: Adessium Foundation, Open Society Foundations, The Sigrid Rausing Trust, The Ford Foundation, Fritt Ord Foundation and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. We also receive support from Australian philanthropist Graeme Wood.

We welcome individual donations in support of our work.

Panama Papers hit political agendas around the world

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 18:00:00 -0400

The office of U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron issues a statement Wednesday that “there are no offshore funds/trusts which the prime minister, Mrs. Cameron or their children will benefit from in future.” It was the most recent in a string of responses about Blairmore, an investment fund run by his father Ian and incorporated in the Bahamas, which avoided paying tax in Britain, as disclosed in the Panama Papers.

Previously the prime minister’s statements about whether he or his family benefitted from his father’s offshore firm Blairmore had been in the present tense, prompting speculation about future benefits. For instance, a spokesperson said Tuesday that “the prime minister, his wife and their children do not benefit from any offshore funds.” That was after trying to dismiss it as a “private matter” on Monday.

Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn had pushed back. “It’s a private matter insofar as it’s a privately held interest. But it’s not a private matter if tax is not being paid. So an investigation must take place, an independent investigation, unprejudiced, to decide whether or not tax has been paid.

“I think the Prime Minister, in his own interest, should tell us exactly what’s been going on.”

He also called for the Cameron government to take a stronger stance with British crown territories such as the Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands. They should be told, “you must obey U.K. tax law, you must not become a harbor for tax avoidance and tax evasion.”

Also on Tuesday, President Barack Obama spoke out about tax havens. In announcing new U.S. Treasury rules designed to make it harder for corporations to reduce their taxes by merging with foreign firms, he also noted, “We’ve had another reminder in this big dump of data coming out of Panama that tax avoidance is a big, global problem. It’s not unique to other countries.

“A lot of it is legal, but that’s exactly the problem. It’s not that they’re breaking the laws, it’s that the laws are so poorly designed.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, battling his Senate colleague Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president, meanwhile used the Panama papers to attack her. “I was opposed to the Panama Free Trade Agreement from day one,” he said in a statement released by his campaign. “I predicted that the passage of this disastrous trade deal would make it easier, not harder, for the wealthy and large corporations to evade taxes by sheltering billions of dollars offshore. I wish I had been proven wrong about this, but it has now come to light that the extent of Panama’s tax avoidance scams is even worse than I had feared.

“My opponent, on the other hand, opposed this trade agreement when she was running against Barack Obama for president in 2008. But when it really mattered she quickly reversed course and helped push the Panama Free Trade Agreement through Congress as Secretary of State. The results have been a disaster.”

In Pakistan, opponents of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, including retired cricket star and politician Imran Khan, hammered him with demands that the country’s corruption watchdog open an investigation. Wednesday Sharif announced that he would do so. Three of his children owned London real estate through offshore companies. according to files examined by the International Consortium of International Journalists and its partners.