STOCKHOLM — Bankrupt Swedish real estate tycoon Hans Thulin had as much as $17 million sheltered offshore at a time when the Swedish government was pursuing him in court for millions of dollars in unpaid debts, according to secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and reviewed by Fokus, Sweden’s leading newsmagazine.

Details of Thulin’s offshore holdings are big news in Sweden because he has been one of the Swedish state’s largest debtors — and because he’s well-remembered in his native country as a lavish collector of art and luxury cars and a symbol of the high-flying, easy-credit ’80s. It was the fall of his commercial property empire that helped signal the beginning of Sweden’s 1990 real estate meltdown.

A government-owned company that had taken over bad debts owed by Thulin sued him in 2007, seeking to force him to repay business loans he’d defaulted on. A trial court imposed a judgment of 150 million Swedish crowns against him in 2009.

By early 2013, the total debt and interest Thulin owed the government had grown to 179 million crowns ($28 million).

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Finnish state-owned postal company Itella has offshore subsidiaries in both Cyprus and the BVI, documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists show.

The revelation comes at a time when the Finnish government promised to be at the frontline of the fight against tax evasion. Since 2011, Finland has explored the possibility of adopting a stricter set of criteria for tax havens, surpassing the standards applied by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Itella, part of the National Mail Company, has had four subsidiaries in tax havens over the past five years; three in Cyprus and one in the British Virgin Islands.

In 2008, Itella bought the Russian logistics company NLC International Corporation, which was registered in the BVI with subsidiaries in Cyprus. Internal documents obtained by the ICIJ and MOT/Finnish Broadcasting Company, YLE, show that the transaction was made through the offshore firm Commonwealth Trust Limited.

The director of Itella Logistics in Russia, Vesa Vertanen, said in an interview with Finnish state television that Itella is going to dissolve the company in the BVI by the end of this year and move it to Cyprus.

Cyprus is a known tax haven favored by Russians who want to hold assets offshore.

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For me, the Offshore Leaks investigation started in September 2012.

ICIJ's deputy director, Marina Walker Guevara, sent me a list of Greek names they had extracted from the data and some extra clues on the material.

She told me that I had two choices: either travel to a country in Eastern Europe to search the data myself now, or wait until November to get remote help from another colleague. Two months was too long to wait. A few days later I travelled to Eastern Europe.

An ICIJ colleague showed me how to search the millions of records. During the first few hours I was totally frustrated; I had to check different tables with names and codes; I had to cross check numbers, shareholders, sham directors and addresses; and read hundreds of emails. And time was pressing - I couldn't occupy his desktop and office forever. My aim was to track down all of the offshore companies connected with Greeks in the next three days and to be at the airport on time. I still am not sure if I tracked them all.

Back in Greece the crosschecking continued. With the help of another ICIJ colleague in Spain, Mar Cabra, new aspects of the Greek offshore world were revealed. The stories behind the complex moves of the directors and shareholders unraveled slowly, and some of them were expanding outside the country.

"Crocodile Dundee" star Paul Hogan may have settled his tax case with Australian authorities but he is accusing his once-trusted tax adviser of absconding with $34 million he helped Hogan hide in offshore tax havens.

There is already an international warrant out for Philip Egglishaw, the man known as the ''bowler hat Englishman'', who is the alleged mastermind behind Australia's biggest tax evasion scheme.

But now the international fugitive has the Australian actor on his tail, with Hogan's advisers taking legal action in the US alleging Egglishaw, who set up elaborate corporate structures in tax havens to help his clients evade tax, has stolen the entertainer's money.

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ICIJ’s investigative series on offshore secrecy – which draws from a cache of 2.5 million secret records – has ignited reactions around the globe.

Since the initial release of stories by the ICIJ and its media partners across the world, public officials have issued statements, governments have launched investigations, and politicians and journalists have been debating the implications of the records and the reporting.

Among the latest reactions and responses: 

• Bayartsogt Sangajav, deputy speaker of the Mongolian Parliament, has reportedly resigned from his post following ICIJ's revelations about his undeclared offshore company and bank account. In a parliamentary session he was asked to explain his actions. Several MPs called for further disciplinary action, including expelling him from Parliament entirely.

Key members of the Malaysian government, their families, and well-heeled associates are among those owning secretive offshore companies in Singapore and the British Virgin Islands, according to a cache of leaked documents.

They include former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad's son Mirzan, Federal Territories and Urban Well-Being Minister Raja Nong Chik Zainal Abidin and Michael Chia, the alleged ‘bagman' for Sabah Chief Minister Musa Aman.

The files, which were obtained by the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and examined by Malaysiakini, show more than 1,500 Malaysians owning offshore companies in Singapore – dubbed as the new Switzerland  – as well as the British Virgin Islands (BVI), an international tax haven.

The ICIJ list comprises a curious mix of Forbes-listed tycoons, parliamentarians, retired politicians, civil servants and their spouses, members of royal families, famous and infamous businesspeople, underworld kingpins and even former beauty queens.

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The story of Portcullis TrustNet and its birthplace — the Cook Islands — is in many ways the story of the offshore system itself.

It’s a largely invisible world, a curious blend of the parochial and the global that’s made up of the minor personalities and politics inside each offshore jurisdiction — many with populations no larger than a small town.

But by establishing special zones, these tiny provinces have changed the face of international finance and business and impacted law enforcement, tax policies and political and economic transparency across the planet.

The Tax Justice Network, an international advocacy group opposed to tax havens, estimates that about one third of all world wealth is held offshore, and about half of all world trade flows through there.

TrustNet, now headquartered in Singapore and with branch offices in 16 other locations, describes itself as a “one-stop shop,” employing lawyers and accountants who help “high net worth” clients manage their money and business activities.

In this they are not alone: there are dozens of other so-called offshore service providers.

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This month marks the beginning of one of the biggest financial leaks in history.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has just released the first stories from a global collaborative project into the world of offshore money. The Tax Justice Network, an advocacy group claims that a third of the world’s wealth is tied up in the secret area of offshore.

For the past 15 months, journalists from over 40 countries have worked together to shed light on this issue.

And here’s some of what they found:

On November 14, 2006, a man going by the name Paul William Hampel was arrested at a Canadian airport on charges of being a Russian spy.

Hampel’s carefully constructed identity portrayed him as a successful businessman, yet for a decade his company did no business.

Only months before his capture, the same apparatus used to create his alias was also employed by a very different spy agency - the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency —to build a secret prison in Lithuania, where U.S. agents interrogated suspected al-Qaeda terrorists.

Earlier again, it was used by the regime of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to cheat the Oil for Food program.

All three deceptions employed a common subterfuge: far-flung corporate entities used as anonymous fronts, with “executives” who lacked knowledge of what the firms were up to.

The activities of these so-called nominee directors are a little noticed part of the world of secretive offshore finance that’s grown so vast that it touches more than 170 of the globe’s 206 countries, but it’s one that’s often drenched in intrigue.

For a fee as low as $90, men and women who often appear to have little or no formal business qualifications lend their names as directors to enterprises they later can claim to know nothing about - even after those enterprises are linked to everything from stock fraud to money laundering.

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