Panama Papers News description

The Panama Papers are a leaked set of 11.5 million confidential documents that provide detailed information on more than 214,000 offshore companies listed by the Panamanian corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca, including the identities of shareholders and directors of said offshore companies. The documents identify (as directors and shareholders of such companies) current government leaders from five countries - Argentina, Iceland, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine and the United Arab Emirates - as well as government officials, close relatives and close associates of various heads of government of more than 40 other countries, including Brazil, China, Peru, France, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Syria and the United Kingdom.

Comprising documents created since the 1970s that amount to 2.6 terabytes of data, the papers were supplied to the Süddeutsche Zeitung in August 2015 by an anonymous source, and subsequently to the U.S.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The papers were distributed to and analyzed by about 400 journalists at 107 media organizations in more than 80 countries. The first news reports based on the set, along with 149 of the documents themselves, were published on April 3, 2016, and a full list of companies is to be released in early May 2016.