Millions of sensitive documents were leaked from a large and secretive Panama wealth services firm, according to reports Sunday.
The nonprofit Center for Public Integrity said the leak “exposes a cast of characters who use offshore companies to facilitate bribery, arms deals, tax evasion, financial fraud and drug trafficking.”
“Behind the email chains, invoices and documents that make up the Panama Papers are often unseen victims of wrongdoing enabled by this shadowy industry,” the center said in a report.
The report sparked speculation about corruption linking prime ministers, plutocrats and criminals. The Prime Minisister of Iceland walked out of an interview when asked about ties to a tax haven exposed by the leak.
The files include nearly 40 years of records and information about more than 210,000 companies in 21 offshore jurisdictions.
A BBC report said that the firm, Mossack Fonseca, saw 11 million internal documents made public. Many had to do with how the Panama-based company helps the wealthy, including politicians all over the world, escape heavy tax burdens in their home countries.
“The data contains secret offshore companies linked to the families and associates of Egypt’s former president Hosni Mubarak, Libya’s former leader Moammar Gadhafi and Syria’s president Bashar Assad,” said the BBC.
The leak also reportedly reveals a $2 billion offshore money trail that leads to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his associates.
The breaking scandal left#panama papers trending on Twitter Sunday.
Edward Snowden, the famed 2013 NSA leaker, said: “the biggest leak in the history of data journalism just went live, and it’s about corruption.”
According to The Guardian, the leaked documents “were obtained from an anonymous source by the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with the Guardian and the BBC.”
