The Center for Public Integrity

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.

Continue reading at ICIJ.org.

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:

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.

Click through to ICIJ.org to continue reading.

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.

Click through to ICIJ.org to continue reading.

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.

Click through to ICIJ.org to continue reading.

The tangled trail of the Magnitsky Affair, a case that’s strained U.S.-Russian relations and blocked American adoptions of Russian orphans, snakes through an offshore haven in the Caribbean. 

The death of Moscow tax attorney Sergei Magnitsky sparked international outrage. It also fueled a push to unravel secret deals that had prompted him to claim that gangsters and government insiders had stolen $230 million from Russia’s treasury.

Magnitsky and other private attorneys investigating the affair on behalf of a major hedge fund followed a path from Russia to bank accounts in Switzerland and luxury properties in Dubai — ending up at a small firm based in the British Virgin Islands that specializes in setting up offshore companies for clients who want to remain in the shadows.

This is the story of behind-the-scenes players in the Magnitsky affair — and the tale of how an offshore go-between provided shelter to fraudsters, money launderers and other shady characters from Russia, Eastern Europe and the United States.

Click through to ICIJ.org to continue reading.

A cache of 2.5 million files has cracked open the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts, exposing hidden dealings of politicians, con men and the mega-rich the world over.

The secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists lay bare the names behind covert companies and private trusts in the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands and other offshore hideaways.

They include American doctors and dentists and middle-class Greek villagers as well as families and associates of long-time despots, Wall Street swindlers, Eastern European and Indonesian billionaires, Russian corporate executives, international arms dealers and a sham-director-fronted company that the European Union has labeled as a cog in Iran’s nuclear-development program.

The leaked files provide facts and figures — cash transfers, incorporation dates, links between companies and individuals — that illustrate how offshore financial secrecy has spread aggressively around the globe, allowing the wealthy and the well-connected to dodge taxes and fueling corruption and economic woes in rich and poor nations alike. The records detail the offshore holdings of people and companies in more than 170 countries and territories.

The hoard of documents represents the biggest stockpile of inside information about the offshore system ever obtained by a media organization. The total size of the files, measured in gigabytes, is more than 160 times larger than the leak of U.S. State Department documents by Wikileaks in 2010.

To analyze the documents, ICIJ collaborated with reporters from The Guardian and the BBC in the U.K., Le Monde in France, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Germany, The Washington Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and 31 other media partners around the world.

A New York state senator and five other political officials have been named in a sweeping federal corruption case — the latest in a series of scandals that helped earn the Empire State a D grade from the State Integrity Investigation.

At the heart of the complaint unsealed Tuesday: federal prosecutors say Sen. Malcolm Smith, a Democrat from Queens, used a series of contacts in an attempt to bribe New York City Republican Party officials to approve his bid for mayor on the GOP ticket.

The case, which allegedly involved tens of thousands of dollars in bribes and agreements to secure state and city funds for development projects, highlights some of the endemic  corruption problems that have plagued New York’s legislature in Albany, where politicians are frequently accused of exchanging cash for securing state funds and candidates exchange donations for political support. The image was reinforced by the State Integrity Investigation, a state-by-state ranking of accountability and transparency carried out last year by the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International.

According to the complaint, Smith had ambitions to run for mayor of New York City, but wanted to run as a Republican. As a Democratic state senator, he needed support from the party to get on the ticket. The solution presented itself in the form of a New York real estate developer, who was cooperating with an undercover FBI agent in exchange for leniency on unspecified charges.