Author Topic: The story behind the massive Panama Papers leak  (Read 895 times)

islander

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The story behind the massive Panama Papers leak
« on: April 08, 2016, 12:22:56 AM »

The story behind the massive Panama Papers leak

Jabeen Bhatti
Special for USA TODAY
April 6, 2016

BERLIN — It started with an email in early 2015: "Hello, this is John Doe. Interested in data?"

"We are very interested," replied a journalist in Munich.

The exchange resulted in internal documents from Mossack Fonseca — a Panama law firm that creates anonymous offshore companies around the world — being sent to staff at the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a large German daily. The newspaper had been involved in tax-haven investigations before.



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islander

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Re: The story behind the massive Panama Papers leak
« Reply #1 on: April 08, 2016, 12:24:06 AM »

The newspaper received about 2.6 terabytes (2,600 gigabytes) worth of information detailing how leaders, celebrities and athletes from around the globe acquired shell companies that can enable owners to cover up their dealings, and hide money.

The newspaper, which described in an article how it acquired the trove of documents, said the source of the material wanted no financial compensation. The source asked only for encryption and other security measures: "There are a couple of conditions. My life is in danger. We will only chat over encrypted files. No meetings, ever. The choice of stories is up to you."

Asked why the source was leaking the documents, the reply was: "I want to make these crimes public."

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islander

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Re: The story behind the massive Panama Papers leak
« Reply #2 on: April 08, 2016, 12:43:55 AM »
"He said that they must be stopped," the newspaper's Bastian Obermayer, who was involved in the project, said in a video. "It's rotten business they are doing."

After receiving the data, the newspaper's staff — realizing the 11. 5 million documents would be too much to take on for one newspaper, brought it to the Washington, D.C.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

The ICIJ had helped coordinate on other projects on tax havens and tax evasion involving the newspaper known as Offshore Leaks, Lux Leaks and Swiss Leaks.



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Re: The story behind the massive Panama Papers leak
« Reply #3 on: April 08, 2016, 12:52:06 AM »

The documents are primarily comprised of emails, pdf files, photo files and excerpts of an internal Mossack Fonseca database. It covers a period spanning from the 1970s to December 2015, according to the ICIJ.

"The sheer number of people we found in the data is becoming clear to us — dictators, Japanese mafia, Sicilian mafia, Russia mafia, weapons dealers, drug dealers, pedophiles," the newspaper's Frederik Obermaier, who also worked on the project, said in the video.



"You start to feel a little nervous when you realize that this one leak is going to expose them all, and that it all started at the Sueddeutsche Zeitung."

http://www.usatoday.com/

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Re: The story behind the massive Panama Papers leak
« Reply #4 on: April 08, 2016, 01:07:50 AM »


The comparative size of the Panama Papers data leak. (Image source: USA Today)

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hubag bohol

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Re: The story behind the massive Panama Papers leak
« Reply #5 on: April 10, 2016, 01:07:59 PM »
The not-completely-crazy theory that Russia leaked the Panama Papers
www.washingtonpost.com/
By Adam Taylor April 9 at 7:00 AM


On the face of it, the Panama Papers don't look good for Russia. Reporters investigating the huge leak of financial data from a Panamanian legal firm have suggested that up to $2 billion in offshore bank accounts could be linked to a circle of friends closely associated with President Vladimir Putin. For many, this information seems to corroborate what has long been rumored: that Putin is corrupt, on a huge scale.

The Panama Papers consist of 11.5 million documents from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. The papers apparently implicate a number of high-profile global figures in potentially illegal financial activities. (The Washington Post)

After a few days of silence, the Russian president himself has taken aim at the allegations, suggesting they were part of a broader U.S. plot to destabilize Russia. But another very different theory is making the rounds in the Russia-watching world. In short, the theory says that Moscow isn't a victim of a Panama Papers plot.

Instead, perhaps it is the Russians who are behind the leak.

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Re: The story behind the massive Panama Papers leak
« Reply #6 on: April 10, 2016, 01:09:41 PM »
Okay, it sounds far-fetched, but this particular idea is especially noteworthy because of who has advanced it: Clifford Gaddy, an economist who works with the Brookings Institution. Gaddy is one of the foremost Western experts on Russia's economy and a former adviser to the Russian Finance Ministry in the 1990s. Along with Fiona Hill of Brookings, he is one of the co-authors of a well-regarded book on the personality of the Russian leader, "Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin."

In a blog post published Thursday on the Brookings website, Gaddy outlined his thoughts on the matter. You should read it all for yourself, but I'll break down his idea into four quick points.

1. It was a hacker backed by the Russian government who emailed the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung to offer the leak in early 2015, the initial contact that would eventually lead to the release of the Panama Papers.

2. There's deliberately little information within the Panama Papers that harms Putin: While the $2 billion figure has been reported widely, the link to Putin is relatively obscure, and the Russian president has survived far worse accusations of corruption.

3. Meanwhile, there's plenty of information in the Panama Papers that has already proven extremely embarrassing for other world leaders. At the least, Gaddy argues, this makes Putin and his reputation for corruption seem like less of an outlier and more of standard operating practice.

4. The fact that so few Americans have been linked to the Panama Papers could suggest that their details were deleted from the documents given to Süddeutsche Zeitung and passed on to other media outlets. If this is true, Gaddy suggests that the lack of this information in the release means that it could be being held back for blackmail purposes.


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Re: The story behind the massive Panama Papers leak
« Reply #7 on: April 10, 2016, 01:10:26 PM »
It's a bold claim, Gaddy admitted in an email Friday, and one that he isn't totally sure of himself. "It's certainly not a theory, hardly even a 'hypothesis,'" Gaddy wrote, adding that it was "more a suggestion of something that ought to be seriously investigated."

Even so, this suggestion has caused a bit of a stir in the Russia-watching world. Karen Dawisha, an academic who also studies Russian corruption closely, tweeted Friday that despite her respect for Gaddy, his latest idea has failed to convince her.

I'm convinced of everything else Gaddy writes, but not this. Americans aren't n #panamapapers because US hasDelaware https://t.co/rUGVj90q19

— Karen Dawisha (@Dawisha) April 8, 2016


Others offered carefully worded praise. Russian American journalist Masha Gessen called it "excellent conspirology" on Facebook, while Brian Whitmore of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty suggested in a tweet that Gaddy was "trolling" the Kremlin.

There are certainly parts of the idea that make a lot of sense. For one, it seems clear that the $2 billion stuff hasn't really hit Putin hard, while some other world leaders who have fraught relations with Russia -- for example, Britain's David Cameron and Ukraine's Petro Poroshenko -- are being seriously rocked by their own links to the scandal.

Why isn't Putin facing a domestic scandal? Well, part of it is simply that Putin is an enormously popular figure in Russia, and it would take a seriously enormous financial scandal to really knock him down. Additionally, many critics are already sure Putin is corrupt — allegations of the Russian president's wealth go as high as $200 billion, which would easily make him the richest man on earth — and it's hard to see how the relatively loose links between Putin and the $2 billion moved through Panama could really shift anyone's thinking on the matter.

Of course, there are other parts of the idea that don't fit together. For one thing, while the lack of U.S. citizens has been widely noted, there are, in fact, a few American links to the Panama Papers. (See this article from McClatchy for details.) It's also possible that more names could come out as more scrutiny is given to the vast amounts of data in the leak. Or perhaps it's just that Americans prefer tax havens other than Panama (as The Washington Post's Scott Higham reports, U.S. citizens are thought to favor more secure havens such as the Isle of Man, the Cayman Islands and Switzerland).

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Re: The story behind the massive Panama Papers leak
« Reply #8 on: April 17, 2016, 11:39:31 AM »

this beats complicated child births. ;D

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