Pandora Papers: Investigative Consortium Exposes Massive Global Corruption

by | Oct 6, 2021 | News

Millions of secret documents uncovered by the biggest journalism partnership in history have exposed the corrupt offshore dealings of world leaders and politicians in 91 countries and territories. These leaked records reveal that many powerful figures could help end this offshore system, but instead benefit from it while their governments ignore “a global stream of illicit money that enriches criminals and impoverishes nations.”

These 11.9 million leaked confidential documents are known as the Pandora Papers. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists obtained them with a team of more than 600 journalists from 150 news outlets that spent two years tracking sources and digging through public documents from dozens of countries.

Their findings detail the offshore purchases of the King of Jordan, who bought three beachfront mansions in the years after Jordanians filled the streets during Arab Spring to protest joblessness and corruption. Through offshore companies, the Czech Republic’s prime minister, a billionaire who has spoken out against the corruption of elites, purchased a lavish $22 million chateau in the French Riviera. The papers further show the dealings of presidents of Ukraine, Kenya and Ecuador and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, among many others.

The records come from 14 offshore services firms from around the world that establish shell companies for clients to keep their financial movements in the shadows. Key players include elite institutions, such as multinational banks, law firms, and accounting practices in the U.S. and Europe.

This investigation shows a larger global entanglement than the ICIJ’s landmark Panama Papers investigation in 2016, which led to police raids, new laws in dozens of countries, and the fall of prime ministers in Iceland and Pakistan. A series of charts highlights the massive scale of the Pandora Papers, such as the countries housing the over 27,000 companies in the data: Where are the beneficial owners revealed in the Pandora Papers from?

Celebrities, too, have moved money offshore, where tax rates are low or zero and their businesses and identities are hidden. ICIJ tracked the shady companies made by stars including Shakira, Ringo Starr, and Elton John.

The papers have sparked calls in over a dozen countries for further investigation into exposed leaders. Further action by governments and journalists across the globe must also hold corrupt executives and the U.S. trust industry to account as they funnel wealth to the rich.

More from The Edge

Finding My Way to Max Tohline’s ‘A Supercut of Supercuts’

We often discover new media fascinations in roundabout ways. In February of 2022, when filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki emailed me to ask if I’d seen Chloé Galibert-Laîné’s “Forensickness” (2022), I had only the vaguest sense of what had come to be called the “video essay.” I...

Complicity and Resistance in a Time of Genocidal Agony

What to Do? I am writing especially thinking about Palestinian women. They have suffered so immeasurably and grotesquely while they have tried to care for their children and their pregnancies, while being malnourished, dehydrated, starved, and heartbroken while death...

The Key to Maintaining Democracy? It’s Conversation.

On January 25th, the Harvard Kennedy School hosted a panel to discuss how candid conversations about  differences in opinion contribute to healthy democracy and social cohesion. The event, which was held on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts,...

Elitism and the Rest of Us as the New Semester Begins

This week, most college and university campuses will open across the country. The ghastly war in Gaza continues and the U.S. has become more involved as it bombs Yemen. So, I am thinking about how unsettled the surround is as higher education institutions begin a new...

War Rape and the Question of Hamas

Israeli Zionist women have been speaking out these last few days to bring attention to the horrific rape of Jewish women, and the lack of outcry of feminists, for them, to this plight. They demand an indictment of Hamas and its sexual treachery towards women on...

The 10 Freeway Has Been Reopened but L.A.’s Transit Problem Remains

During the early hours of November 11, a fire erupted in a storage yard underneath the I-10 freeway near downtown Los Angeles, structurally compromising a large section of the road and resulting in, what was at the time, claimed to be an indefinite closure of the...

From My Body to Yours, and Gaza to the World

A Meditation on Death, Killing, and Possibility I knew my body was healing from the surgery when I found myself ready to engage with the world and posted on Facebook: I am always anti-zionist. And never an antisemite. And always an anti-racist feminist against...