NIGERIAN politicians and businessmen, families and associates have been listed among names behind covert companies and private trusts in the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands and other offshore hideaways.
The secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) laid bare names behind covert companies and private trusts in the offshore hideaways.
The list also included American doctors and dentists; middle-class Greek villagers, 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 labelled as a cog in Iran’s nuclear-development programme.
A cache of 2.5 million files 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 new leak confirmed the allegation of involvement in shady deals against some Nigerian millionaires and politicians and the calls by some non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other civil society organisations on the need to probe the wealth of many Nigerians.
The leaked files provided facts and figures on cash transfers, incorporation dates, links between companies and individuals and illustrated how offshore financial secrecy had spread 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 detailed the offshore holdings of people and companies in more than 170 countries and territories.
The hoard of documents represented the biggest stockpile of inside information about the offshore system ever obtained by a media organisation.
The total size of the files, measured in gigabytes, is more than 160 times larger than the leak of United States (US) State Department documents by Wikileaks in 2010.
To analyse the documents, ICIJ collaborated with reporters from The Guardian and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in the United Kingdom (UK), 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.
Eighty-six journalists from 46 countries used high-tech data crunching and shoe-leather reporting to sift through emails, account ledgers and other files covering nearly 30 years.
“I’ve never seen anything like this. This secret world has finally been revealed,” said Arthur Cockfield, a law professor and tax expert at Queen’s University in Canada, who reviewed some of the documents during an interview with the CBC.
He said the documents reminded him of the scene in the movie classic, “The Wizard of Oz,” in which “they pull back the curtain and you see the wizard operating this secret machine.”
Anti-corruption campaigners argued that offshore secrecy undermined law and order and forced average citizens to pay higher taxes to make up for revenues that vanished offshore.
Studies have estimated that cross-border flows of global proceeds of financial crimes total between $1 trillion and $1.6 trillion a year.
The 15-month investigation found that, alongside perfectly legal transactions, the secrecy and lax oversight offered by the offshore world allowed fraud, tax dodging and political corruption to thrive.
The 15-month investigation found that, alongside perfectly legal transactions, the secrecy and lax oversight offered by the offshore world allowed fraud, tax dodging and political corruption to thrive.
Offshore financial industry leak exposes identities of thousands of holders of anonymous wealth from around the world, as millions of internal records leaked from Britain’s offshore financial industry, exposing, for the first time, the identities of thousands of holders of anonymous wealth from around the world.
The documents also provided possible new clues to crimes and money trails that have gone cold.
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