Today 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. Read full story here.

• One of Mongolia’s most senior politicians says he is considering resigning from office after being confronted with evidence that he has an offshore company and a secret Swiss bank account.

• Newly uncovered documents link Maria Imelda Marcos Manotoc, the eldest child of the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and now a senior political figure in her own right, to two secretive offshore trusts and an offshore company.

• A prominent Canadian lawyer, husband to a Liberal senator, moved CA$1.7 million (US$1.1 million) to secretive financial havens while he was locked in battle with the Canada Revenue Agency over his taxes, according to documents in a massive leak of offshore financial data.

• A corporate mogul whose business empire has won building contracts worth billions of dollars amid Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s massive construction spree is tied to the president’s family through secretive offshore companies.

• The prominent Thais listed in secret documents as owners of offshore holdings includes the former wife of ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a sitting senator, a former high-ranking defense ministry official, Forbes-listed tycoons, and a former government minister whose assets in the United States are frozen because of her alleged links to Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe.

• Greek citizens who own or direct offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands and other tax havens rarely declare them to Greek tax officials, a review of more than 100 companies shows. Just four out of 107 offshore companies investigated by ICIJ are registered with tax authorities as the law usually requires, particularly when the firms hold assets or conduct business in Greece. Officials apparently have no record of the other 103 firms — or whether the owners declared any assets held by these entities or paid taxes on them.
• Finally, for those interested in how ICIJ managed to tackle records cache, the data manager of the project, Duncan Campbell, writes an in-depth explanation of how our journalists were able make sense of the 260 gigabytes of information obtained.

Four large databases, half a million text, PDF, spreadsheet, image and web files were dissected to reveal over 130,000 records on the people and agents who run, own, benefit from or hide behind offshore companies.

• A list containing examples of some of the most high-profile names uncovered in this investigation, along with records of their offshore companies. Those named come in the form of politicians, businessmen, army generals, tycoons, relatives of dictators, and are scattered across 29 different countries.

We hope you enjoy these stories; there will be more to follow daily for the next couple of weeks.

Taxmen Have Little Clue of Offshore Companies Owned by Greeks
By Harry Karanikas and Marina Walker Guevara

Officials say they will check ICIJ’s data for any evidence of misconduct by owners of offshore companies. 

Greek citizens who own or direct offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands and other tax havens rarely declare them to Greek tax officials, an International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ review of more than 100 companies shows.

After learning about ICIJ’s findings, the Greek Finance Ministry said it would examine the data and determine whether there’s any evidence of improper or illegal conduct by owners of offshore companies.

Two of the offshore companies in the ICIJ data were used to buy and refurbish one of the world’s most storied yachts — the Christina O, where the Onassis family once entertained John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Winston Churchill, among other celebrities and statesmen. Read more….