In an era of widening authoritarianism & inequality, the Pandora Papers investigation provides an unequaled perspective on how money & power operate in the 21st century
some key points PandoraLeaks: The largest investigation in journalism history exposes a shadow financial system that benefits the world’s most rich and powerful. ICE
Who got exposed: 35 current & former world leaders, 330+ politicians & public officials in 91 countries including fugitives ICIJ identified 956 companies in offshore havens tied to 336 high-level politicians and public officials, including country leaders, cabinet ministers, ambassadors, and others. More than two-thirds of those companies were set up in the British Virgin Islands people linked by the secret documents to offshore assets include companies by Pakistani political players. This time, the offshore holdings of people close to Khan are being disclosed, including his finance minister and a top financial backer. Khan’s water resources minister, Chaudhry Moonis Elahi, contactedAsiaciti, a Singapore-based offshore services provider, in 2016 about setting up a trust to invest the profits from a family land deal that had been financed by what the lender later claimed was an illegal loan, The Pandora Papers reveal that in 2007, the wife of Gen. Shafaat Ullah Shah, then one of Pakistan’s leading generals and a former aide to President Pervez Musharraf, acquired a $1.2 million apartment in London through a discreet offshore transaction.
Pak PM vows to investigate all citizens mentioned in Pandora leaks & Pakistan opposition urges PM to remove ministers named in Pandora Papers, India’s cricket superstar Sachin Tendulkar, pop music diva Shakira, supermodel Claudia Schiffer and an Italian mobster known as “Lell the Fat One.” Banks worldwide helped their customers set up at least 3,926 offshore companies with the assistance of Alemán, Cordero, Galindo & Lee, a Panamanian law firm led by a former ambassador to the US. The firm set up 312 companies in the British Virgin Islands for clients of the American financial services giant Morgan Stanley.
Pandora Papers show that an English accountant in Switzerland worked with lawyers in the British Virgin Islands to help Jordan’s monarch, King Abdullah II, secretly purchase 14 luxury homes, worth more than $106 million, in the U.S. and the UK Catch in Lebanon: PM Najib Mikati, and his predecessor, Hassan Diab, as well as Riad Salameh, the governor of Lebanon’s central bank, who is under investigation in France for alleged money laundering.
A sad irony: Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta told the BBC in 2018. “If you can’t explain yourself, including me, then I have a case to answer.”
The leaked records listed Kenyatta and his mother as beneficiaries of a secretive foundation in Panama.
The leaked records show that, in 2009, Czech PM Babis injected $22 million into a string of shell companies to buy a sprawling property, known as Chateau Bigaud, in a hilltop village in Mougins, France, near Cannes. The Pandora Papers show that, in 2017, Blair and his wife, Cherie, became the owners of an $8.8 million Victorian building by acquiring the British Virgin Islands company that held the property. The London building now hosts Cherie Blair’s law firm. The PandoraPapers provide details about tens of millions of dollars moved from offshore havens in the Caribbean and Europe into South Dakota, a sparsely populated American state that has become a major destination for foreign assets. The American billionaires mentioned in the secret documents include two tech moguls, Robert F. Smith and Robert T. Brockman, whose trusts have been the targets of investigations by U.S. authorities The records show that, in 2015, a compliance manager at the Panama law firm Alcogal found that the Cypriot law firm helped a Russian billionaire and former senator, Leonid Lebedev, conceal ownership of four companies by listing law firm employees as owners Another Russian in the Pandora Papers who has ties to Putin is Konstantin Ernst, a television executive, an Oscar-nominated producer.
records show that, by 2019, the value of Ernst’s stake in the property holdings topped $140 million.
the Pandora Leaks put a big question mark on the efforts made for FATF as well for all countries.
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