So, it was in the winter of 2015,
I was at the house with my parents,
with my wife and my kids.
And everybody was sick, so really sick.
I was the last one standing.
Then I got this first ping, this first message from a person who
called himself John Doe, and asked if I would be interested
in data.
We turn now to the bombshell causing shockwaves
around the world, the so-called Panama Papers.
What may be the largest leak of secret documents
in history.
Massive document leak allegedly showing
how world leaders and the mega-rich hide billions
of dollars.
A new report which finds eight billionaires
own as much wealth as the poorest half of the
world's population.
The papers paint a picture of wide-spread
corruption and tax evasion.
Now we have journalists stepping in,
trying to tear down those barriers of secrecy and exposing
what is happening behind closed doors.
The revelation now kicking off a
world-wide investigation.
The whole issue here is about secrecy.
People can create shell corporations and secretly move
money around.
World-wide estimates suggest tens of
trillions of dollars are hidden in off-shore accounts.
What's really shocking is the fact that twelve
current or former heads of state are being accused in
these papers.
A journalist investigating the Panama Papers
has been killed, sending other journalists into hiding for fear
of their safety.
The law firm is denying any wrongdoing,
but this scandal, the Panama Papers,
is just beginning.
My viewpoint is entirely my own.
Income inequality is one of the defining issues of our time.
It affects all of us, the world over.
Still, questions remain.
Why?
And why now?
The Panama Papers provide a compelling answer to
these questions.
Massive, pervasive corruption.
It's not a coincidence that the answers come from a law firm.
Mossack Fonseca used its influence to write and bend laws
worldwide to favor the interest of criminals over a period
of decades.
In the first day and the first days,
it was so fascinating because this window in our world opened
where nobody had ever looked in.
I always wanted to write.
Um, I wanted to become a novelist,
but that didn't really work out, so I intended to become a
sports writer.
And that also didn't work out, and here I am, so...
Well, I think it's, um, more or less the defense for
injustice in some way.
We founded our own paper in Rosenheim,
where I come from, because we had the feeling that all the
media there are very much right-wing orientated and that
your important stories are not really told.
The fact that the data of Mossack Fonseca,
which I knew as a black hole.
They work with all kinds of criminals.
You know, they all hold the information that people who want
to keep their secrets put in there to disappear from
the public.
So I knew the company, and I thought,
you know, this guy has access to the inner stuff of
Mossack Fonseca.
I'm the guy who wants to have it.
Mossack Fonseca is a law firm from Panama,
and their business is secrecy.
If you have about a thousand euros,
you can buy an offshore company, it's quite easy,
and then you can even buy, like,
shame directors which means that all the business you do,
someone else is signing, someone else is "doing the business".
So no one actually knows that you own stuff,
and you can hide all your businesses.
There's a world that is only accessible for the powerful and
the richest, where they hide their money,
where they enable money laundering,
corruption, and actually, the plundering of all continents.
Since 2015, the richest one percent have
been more wealthy than the rest of the world's
population combined.
Now Oxfam says the poorest 10% have seen their income increase
by less than $3 a year between 1988 and 2011.
If we have streets that are in not a good condition,
if we do not have enough preschool places or good schools
or if we do have to pay too much money for universities,
that is due to the fact that there's so many people out there
that are avoiding and evading taxes.
That's a problem that is concerning every country all
around the world, and every one of us.
In the first days, it didn't seem like this is the
biggest leak in history of journalism.
It only was, this seems to be a really good story.
The amount of data that Bastian and me received
grew and grew.
It was really like an addiction.
I spent night and day clicking through the data.
When we then found the first names of heads of state
heads of government.
We found, you know, the best friend of Vladimir Putin.
We found the Icelandic Prime Minister.
Even celebrities.
We always found something that I thought this is really
worth reporting.
If you find money tied to Bashar Al-Assad,
and to Vladimir Putin, and to other dictators,
then you somehow have the feeling maybe it's not a good
idea that only I know.
Some colleagues asked us, actually,
are you crazy sharing a scoop?
Giving away something our newspaper could have alone?
But by sharing, we enabled this investigation to be something
big and to make our investigations better.
So we reached out to the ICIJ in Washington and
tracked the data.
ICIJ was created 20 years ago,
and we can say that its mission is to defeat the traditional
model of the lone wolf investigative reporter.
The lone wolf investigative reporter is all for herself or
himself, and so ICIJ was created as a network of investigative
reporters in more than 60 countries who collaborate on
stories that are too complex, and that need to be told from a
collective perspective, from a collaborative perspective,
that need to be told across borders,
in collaboration.
The general meeting is at 3:45.
I am originally from Argentina.
I went into journalism fairly young at 18,
decided to be a journalist.
I saw a lot of, uh, inequality in my country growing up,
a lot of corruption, and I wanted to do something about it,
but not from an activist point of view,
but from a journalistic point of view.
When we started receiving the data from
Suüddeutsche Zeitung and analyzing it and realizing that
it was connected to 200 countries,
that there were thousands of public figures and prime
ministers and presidents and princesses and queens,
and we have to do the biggest investigation we have ever done
to do justice to this data.
I have to admit, my first thought was skepticism
because I thought, well, we've done these stories on
off-shore before.
We've done, I think at that stage,
four or five of them, and I was wondering how it was gonna be
possible to get all the media partners interested in doing
another story about off-shore, but we really had cracked the
off-shore.
Well, even though we had done previous stories,
we didn't have this kind of information before,
and I really thought it was a breakthrough.
11.5 million documents.
You have all these complex kind of documents,
some that you familiarize with, but sometimes you also have
databases within them.
They were mostly emails,
PDFs and everything else, but because there were so many
millions of documents, we had to make it easy for journalists to
search through them by using data sets,
for example, all the clients of Mossack Fonseca,
all the intermediaries, clients per country,
and so on.
Every company has a number and a folder,
so it's very easy to navigate, actually,
in the original data.
Then we upload it to a platform that we call
"Blacklight", and this becomes like,
Google, where you have a search box.
So you're actually able to figure out what are some names
of people of public interest in your country are present in
that data.
One big danger here was that someone was feeding us the
documents and then would perhaps slip in some false information
into the documents.
We wanted to make sure that wasn't happening.
We had done some work on Mossack Fonseca in the past,
so we actually had a set of documents that we could compare
the information we were getting from the new source,
the John Doe source, with what we had before.
So my, you know, early stage was to to keep questioning
everything and to make sure that we were jumping every hurdle.
We decided to reconstruct a database of the
companies and the shareholders connected to Mossack Fonseca.
It's called Linkurious, and you just start typing people's
names, or companies' names.
You will get a circle called a node,
and if you click on it, it start expanding,
and then you will be able to see how many companies a person is
connected to or who are the shareholders behind a company.
We literally took months to make available this
information to the journalists, and we were making it available
in batches up until the very end.
I think the last batch of information of documents was
released perhaps a couple of months before publication.
You don't just call great reporters that you have
heard of.
You have to call people that you know you can work with who are
excellent reporters, but also people that you can trust.
We had been getting to know the team at McClatchy,
and they ticked every box.
They really wanted to work as a team.
Who's surprised that bad guys hide their money?
You know, nobody was saying that was the surprise.
The surprise is, yeah, you pull this veil back and you see this
is how they do it.
Everything you thought was happening,
here's the evidence.
It is.
Yeah, because of...
I'm a former South America Bureau Chief for the company,
and Mossack Fonseca is a Latin company,
Latin clients, and so it was an area that I could help with.
I grew up in-in Ecuador as a child.
I grew up a little different than most Americans because I
saw the poverty, I saw kids with no legs begging in front of the
soccer stadium on Saturdays, and so you know this different world
exists, but to have it so spelled out clearly where you
can see.
You can start to see these connections,
and then the rest of it is kind of the legwork.
Okay, you know they have an offshore account,
so what?
You know, what do you do from there?
What more can you say about that?
Usually as a, as a reporter,
you have tips, you have some kind of roadmap of where you
want to go with a story.
With this, we had absolutely no roadmap.
We weren't the big guys, you know?
We were the ones who tried to break stories that the big guys
didn't have.
We were the, the underdogs, to some degree.
It was also something that we had to kind of sell to our
company at the time, because they had decided that they were
gonna shut their foreign bureaus.
They were wondering what value,
foreign news would have to their readers.
Why are people gonna care that the rich don't pay their taxes
and crooks are crooks?
Everyone knows that.
What he didn't understand is that this was such an enormous
amount of data, it was revealing a,
a whole world.
It wasn't just a story about offshores;
It was, it was the goods.
We had the goods on how it worked.
I'm a nerd about journalism.
I had been a journalist for over 15 years,
and I look at myself as a person that wants to be the
pipeline for minority groups to publish their story,
to ask questions inside the government and find answers for
those groups.
I got a call from Marina Walker,
the Deputy Director of ICIJ.
She asked me, do-do you want to work on a leak?
And we have a lot of Icelandic names in the leak.
And we have your prime minister there and his wife.
And at that moment, uh, everything froze in front of me.
I thought to myself, wow, this is going to be a bomb here
in Iceland.
Nobody knew about his offshore company called Wintris.
If you Googled Wintris before the Panama Papers,
you couldn't find anything, and the prime minister hadn't been
transparent about his involvement into the
offshore world.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's a pleasure for me to be here today
at Iceland Investment Forum.
It takes time for any given country to resurface from
political turmoil after a large-scale economic crisis.
We've already made significant progress,
and I'm convinced that the policy this government has put
forward is a sound one, and that is what bring further benefits.
I have to admit that when you hear the prime minister is
involved, his wife and other big business,
people in Iceland very powerful people,
then you start to think about what will happen?
Hope to see you and your money in Iceland.
At this point, we continue on to London,
and I met with The Guardian, because I knew if they were
involved that it'd be easier to convince other media partners to
get involved.
This was a really important leak.
I think, I think we've had three super leaks this century so far.
We have Wikileaks where we got the kind of unmediated view
of the most powerful country on Earth,
the United States.
The biggest leak of U.S.
military secrets ever.
Website Wikileaks hit the "send" button on some 400,000
sensitive documents about the Iraq war.
Then we had Snowden who came along,
who proved that all of our data is being collected all the time,
that we're being surveilled.
I, sitting at my desk, uh, certainly had the authorities
to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal
judge to even the President, if I had a personal email.
He sort of lifted what I would call mass surveillance.
And then we had the Panama Papers.
We had emails, uh, between the law firm and what they called
their clients, which typically meant other intermediaries,
banks, lawyers, accountants all over the world.
We had passport scans and we had kind of incorporation documents,
we had a lot of postage stamps from these very
exotic locations.
Pretty much all of it was set up so that no one can kind of
peer inside.
And, and suddenly, we had a kind of treasure trove of stuff.
I've been on The Guardian for about 20 years.
12 years as a foreign correspondent bouncing around
the world: Afghanistan, Iraq, Berlin,
and then I was placed into Moscow,
where I kind of really plunged into what you might call kind of
post-Soviet muck.
Corruption, espionage, Vladimir Putin,
his money, question mark, and so on.
You're not just going in,
going oh, look, you know, here's the whole story in black and
white for me.
It's a lot of detective work, of,
of painstaking piecing together.
You don't just dump stuff.
You find the narratives, you make them matter to people.
I joined The Guardian in 2011 as telecoms correspondent,
and, because I speak French, I was pulled into an investigation
into HSBC Bank, and its Swiss operation,
which was the first ICIJ investigation that I'd
worked on.
The massive investigation by media outlets
including France's Le Monde and Britain's Guardian Newspaper.
They've revealed that HSBC Swiss private banking arm has helped
thousands of wealthy clients to evade tax.
It was a big story over here,
and then I, I got brought in to do the Panama Papers a few month
after that.
I knew that there were companies in Malta that were
using Mossack Fonseca to set up companies in Panama for their
clients, but what I never imagined was that I would find
the name of a cabinet minister in there.
There were three companies that were set up.
The names of Konrad Mizzi and of Konrad Mizzi's wife,
Sai Mizzi, and Konrad Mizzi's children appeared in
the documentation.
There were never any names given for the third company, Egrant.
My mother, through a different sources,
one of who worked in a bank where documentation related to
this third company was kept, worked out that the shares were
being held in the name of the Prime Minister's wife,
Michelle Muscat.
I think that's when we realized that what we were dealing with
in Malta was a system of state capture,
that every institution of the state has been captured by
this gang.
They're laundering money, they're laundering campaign
funding, and they're going to go to prison for a long time.
I was sure of that at the time.
This is all about secrecy and the ability to hide
your money, your assets.
The rich and the super-rich,
together with most sort of multi-national corporations,
essentially exited quietly, sort of slipped off stage from the
messy business of-of-of universal taxation some
time ago.
Before I started work on the Panama Papers,
I thought that offshore was a kind of small,
minor, who cares, you know, little aspect of the economic
system we knew not so much about,
and after reading the Panama Papers,
I realized it is the economic system.
It is the system.
Eight trillion dollars is stuffed in tax havens,
western countries, including the U.S.,
are losing about 200 billion dollars a year in tax revenues.
We were still debating, at that time,
whether tax avoidance was a matter of public interest or
not, or could you simply do what you liked with your money?
But what it did establish for us,
the scale of it, it just showed you there were underground
rivers of money washing around the globe unbeknownst to
most people.
We are writing about an incredibly damaging part of our
economy that has become so central and so mainstream that
it's creating French revolution levels of inequality
and injustice.
And the challenge we have is to be able to bring this story home
to people, to show them that this story matters to you,
affects your life, and guess what?
You are the victim in this story.
Decisions have been made that
have spared the wealthy, while focusing instead on
reining in middle and low-income citizens.
The collective impact of these failures has been a complete
erosion of ethical standards, ultimately leading to a novel
system we still call capitalism, but which is tantamount to
economic slavery.
Hopelessly backward and inefficient courts have failed.
Judges have too often acquiesced to the arguments of the rich
whose lawyers, and not just Mossack Fonseca,
are well-trained in honoring the letter of the law while
simultaneously doing everything in their power to desecrate
its spirit.
Leave your number, and I will get back to you as
soon as I can.
Thank you very much.
Ben, hey, it's Kevin.
Since we have outstanding matters,
give me a shout back.
Bye.
One of the things that is particularly interesting about
the Panama Papers is you have all the email traffic,
all these different people who appear in these email threads
going back and forth on how to handle something.
You see their personalities and who in the Compliance
Department, who is more serious about really cracking down and
the tension between management and compliance.
So at one point, the Geneva office basically says,
you know, they-they found that you've got a Syrian tied to a,
to Bashar Al-Assad whose now under sanction and everything at
the time of these emails, and the Geneva office says,
well, HSBC's still working with him so I don't see why
we shouldn't.
You know, so you kinda see what their thinking is.
You know, they're willing to work with bad money,
they just have to be clean about it.
The customer said, I need to do the following in terms of
hiding money.
Will you do it for me?
And Mossack Fonseca, these are all on the records,
would say sure, we'll give you a Panamanian corporation,
a trust a bank account somewhere else,
and not to worry.
Nobody will follow the trail.
So simplified, it would explain how the system works in a really
understandable way.
I worked on a case involving a drug trafficker in the
Cayman Islands.
His lawyer in Miami said, go see Joe Blow in the Cayman Islands
and he'll set you up.
We got everything a man could want.
Joe Blow in the Cayman Islands sets up a corporation,
the corporation opens a bank account.
The guy who is the drug trafficker now puts money in the
bank account and lets the lawyer in Cayman control that
bank account.
There comes a moment six months later...
You took out the money.
Yeah.
He wants to move the money to hide the trail,
and he calls the lawyer and says,
well, we need another bank account in the name of another
corporation, and I want to transfer the money from
Corporation A to Corporation B, and let's do it so the amounts
don't match.
And then, the moment comes when he says,
I want to use the money, and he goes back for the lawyer in
Cayman and he says, we're gonna have the bank that has the
second transfer lend the money to the guy's brother who owns a,
massage parlor in Houston.
That way, it'll look like a loan, non-taxable.
Where did you get it?
I borrowed it.
The whole thing looks like it's perfectly clean
and perfectly okay.
Hey, how you doing?
I was kind of skeptical because I wasn't a big fan of inviting
so many colleagues.
I thought, you know, maybe 50 or 100 really enough,
and we knew around 50 or 100 from previous investigations,
so we trusted them.
Do they know that you got the data?
Or that it's out there available for someone?
I wondered if we could keep this whole project secret.
There's one basic rule, and that might sound rude,
but it's important.
That's shut up and encrypt.
We always told our colleagues that you cannot tell anyone.
Not your wife, not your best friend,
nobody, about this project, and you have to encrypt everything.
You know, my primary interest at this-this stage of
the investigation was to establish public interest.
So we only were interested in public figures.
You know, politicians, businesspeople,
anyone with a public profile.
And you know, the fastest way to find that out is to give a set
of documents from Indonesia to an Indonesian journalist.
Give a set of documents from Iceland to an
Icelandic journalist.
They would identify pretty quickly who was worth looking at
on this list and who wasn't worth looking at.
I was angry that I had, nobody had called me,
and I wasn't, I wasn't involved.
You know, I have never collaborated in a giant thing
like that.
I collaborate within my newsroom,
sometimes with, like, one, you know,
an outside group.
Most news organizations are not global,
and then I think this becomes much more important because it
seems like more and more, the best stories are global.
This was like a ringing affirmation that you can
actually do it, uh, and you can do it at-at scale.
Then the ICIJ said, for example, we need somebody in Panama.
And I said, I don't trust anybody in Panama.
When I first looked at the assignment
that we were going to do, I flipped.
And the first document I saw, it was an invoice.
That's when I said, oh, my god.
This is huge, because invoices are probably one of the most,
private documents within a law firm,
and then when I see the names of people I know in the database,
you know, I was really, really, really scared because I knew
what was coming behind that, and I knew the consequences that
this was going to have.
Rita Vasquez was also a lawyer in the offshore services
industry for many years, so when we learned that,
we were fascinated.
We had the opportunity to work with an insider who understands
this industry from within.
Seeing my friends and people that I care for in that
data really made me wanted to go deeper into the project.
As a newspaper organization, it is not our duty to tell if a
private person is doing something wrong with their own
money, but it's our duty to tell if somebody who had access to
public funds or if somebody who had,
be part of a government or had some sort of a jurisdictional
power was doing something wrong.
The mandate of La Prensa was to return freedom of
expression to the country as an infrastructure for democracy.
In the midst of dictatorship.
But somehow it worked, and in six months,
we were the newspaper of record of Panama.
When we sat at our first editorial meeting after
everything was set up, we said, well,
how are we gonna handle this?
Do we go softly increasing our pressure or do we hit 'em
straight in the face from day one?
We decided the second.
When we heard Mossack Fonseca,
we knew that we were uniquely positioned within the project
because I played for the Mossack Fonseca softball team in
the BVI.
Four of our closest friends worked for Mossack Fonseca.
And so we had a perspective that out of the journalists,
there were two people that knew the inner workings of that
company better than anybody.
My journalism career was never going to lead to any kind
of greatness.
I was never gonna work for the New York Times.
You know, I was the English editor of La Prensa in Panama.
That's not the sort of things that make a great bio,
and I always compared it to a career minor league pitcher that
suddenly you get to start game seven of the World Series.
When you find out it's world leaders,
it's drug traffickers.
Ia Reina Del Sur, who is one of the most famous female
narco-terrorists in history; Carlos Quintero,
who is described as making Pablo Escobar look like a baby.
All of these names that come flooding at you,
and you, your first thought is, how did they get away with this?
At least that's my assumption.
I mean, we've been working on offshore since, for 2012.
My private explanation, more or less,
is that I know that the source had contact with other outlets,
even before me, and they had not reacted in the way that the
leaker wished they had.
Some outlets may have passed just because they tend
not to do giant collaborations.
You're devoting some of your best people to something that
might take a year.
That, resources are scarce.
Investigative talent on your payroll is-is scarce,
it's expensive, and you're, you're taking a leap into
something that, from the beginning,
you know is not gonna be an exclusive.
The media has failed.
In addition to Suüddeutsche Zeitung and ICIJ,
and despite explicit claims to the contrary,
several major media outlets did have editors review documents
for the Panama Papers.
They chose not to cover them.
There's this probably frustrated person or those
persons, we don't know, trying to reach someone that is
actually listening.
I mean, there was a flavor of John Doe's personality.
John Doe was worried about exposure.
He was also kind of worried about his own sort of personal
safety, so we don't know who it is.
It could be a he, it could be a she.
I don't think it's a they.
I don't think anyone benefits,
you know, it's kind of death by a thousand cuts if you give a
little information here, a little information there,
you end up compromising your source,
and so I've kind of pushed back internally,
I think, on that, so that people are more cautious about
what they say about the source.
There are lots of good reasons for sources to be afraid
of talking to the press.
It can be an enormous risk.
You know, they can get fired,
they can get jailed in some places,
they can get killed.
And so, but one of those reasons is they don't trust the
operational security of the journalist,
and sometimes they're right to be very worried about that,
and they should, you know, if you're a source out there,
you should do your due diligence and pick your
journalist carefully.
I've watched as one after another,
whistleblowers and activists in the United States and Europe
have had their lives destroyed, and the circumstances they find
themselves in after shining a light on obvious wrongdoing.
Snowden, who was holed up in Hong Kong,
wanted in the U.S., is now in Russia.
Edward Snowden is stranded in Moscow,
exiled due to the Obama Administration's decision to
prosecute him under the Espionage Act.
Bradley Birkenfeld was awarded millions for his information
concerning Swiss bank UBS, and was still given a prison
sentence by the Justice Department.
Legitimate whistleblowers who expose unquestionable
wrongdoing, whether insiders or outsiders,
deserve immunity from government retribution.
Because of its nature, of how global it was,
we all realized that we need to get together in person,
so Munich was the perfect place, of course,
because we needed to go to the home of Suüddeutsche Zeitung.
That, itself, had to stay secret,
so you couldn't say, "I'm in Munich for X."
People will naturally ask, well, you know,
what, what are you doing there?
Oh, work meeting or, uh, you had to come up with something that
didn't sound anything like what you were doing there.
The meeting was kind of the decisive point.
It was more or less our job to make people enthusiastic about
it and to get them on board.
I was so nervous.
I hadn't slept for three nights because it was,
I mean, I was really, really nervous because I thought if I
mess this up, you know, then this is the big,
the big chance.
The biggest collaboration of investigative journalists...
Sitting in front of more than a hundred journalists showed me
the first time how big this project already was at
that moment.
It was like the United Nations of journalism,
and I've never experienced anything like it.
We were working on a story, and we were all working on
it together.
Sorry, well, I'm Emilia.
I'm from Venezuela.
I think...
We are not, uh, forcing you to do this story.
We are not paying you to do this story.
This is the story, and you need to invest in it,
and you are only going to get out of it as much as you put
into it.
Everybody was, I'm all in.
I want to know more.
It's a time right now in newsrooms of
great uncertainty.
You know, what will be the fate of newspapers,
which used to be the watchdogs of the media.
In a time when everyone is broke,
when no one's clicking the ads, where Facebook is taking all our
money, where, where newsrooms are-are just kind of
empty-pocketed...
We really had to convince these media
organizations and these journalists to work together,
and we often got responses like, why do we need you?
Or why do we need one another?
We can do it on our own.
And perhaps 10, 15 years ago, it was pre-media crisis and a lot
of newspapers were feeling really strong still,
and they still had foreign correspondents and thought that
they could do it on their own, but as the crisis in the media
took place, and stories became more complex,
as technology evolved, it became obvious that we needed to join
forces, and they learned through the process how much more
impactful and powerful their reporting can become when we
work as a collective.
We immediately realized the impact of having more people
from different countries inside the investigation because we had
more, more, more findings.
Generally, I would say we found the anonymous
international rich.
We, we found Spanish royals, we found a German chicken farmer,
we found a French dentist, we found people who would,
use fake names when dealing with their lawyers,
so instead of saying, you know, you know,
hello, here is Ivan, you know, they would say,
"Hi, it's Harry Potter."
And, and there was correspondents,
you know, dear Harry, your $25,000
has arrived in the Bahamas.
I mean, it was just like the wo- most weird fishing expedition.
I mean, there were fish you would expect,
and there was some very ugly, small fish you didn't expect.
Whenever I went into the data,
I found something new.
I found scandals in Africa, in Latin America.
Messi now, everyone on the edge of their
seats, Messi going for goal!
Oh!
He's a man on a mission!
Lionel Messi, his family fortune,
is in the Panama Papers, and is now in the courts.
No one in their right mind in Latin America thought that FIFA
wasn't corrupt.
It was not a surprise to find the FIFA officials.
That was kind of one of, people thought was gonna be in there.
Kids are under contract, 13 or 14,
whether or not they ever become a pro has very little to do with
their talent level, and more to do with which lawyer is screwing
what agent in a business deal.
In Lionel Messi, there's no evidence that he himself had any
hand in any of this, but the people who handle him and the
whole contracts and everything, they did.
And we will restore the image of FIFA and the respect of
FIFA, and everyone in the world will applaud us and will applaud
all of you for what we'll do in FIFA in the future.
We found Sergey Roldugin, Putin's best friend,
ostensibly, second-hand car, not very wealthy,
but we found almost a billion dollars.
It came from Bank Rossiya, which is a kind of crony bank from the
regime in Saint Petersburg, right through to secret offshore
companies, and then a lot of that cash was recycled back into
Russia, including, um, into the wedding resort where Putin's
daughter, Caterina, got married in 2013.
And so from Russia, what we saw was,
in a way, what you might call a kind of neo-feudal system.
You could see how not just Putin's KGB chums were
billionaires, but how the next generation were accumulating
assets, marrying each other, dodging American sanctions and
so on.
I mean, if you're Vladimir Putin,
you don't go to Mossack Fonseca and say,
"I want a company in my name."
But you'd probably send someone that you trust.
And this is exactly how this world works.
When you can set up corporations in such a complex
way and changing ownership.
One woman I looked into was Leticia Montoya,
a director in 10,969 corporations.
Think about that.
I mean, she doesn't, has no idea whatsoever what those
corporations do.
It's just a job, and she's a secretary.
She, I mean, those who went to her house could have seen that
she has no money, she lives in a fisherman community,
not in the city.
I mean, it's not like she made any money on this.
This has gone on country after country after country.
The amounts that are being pulled out are really at the
expense of average people who simply can't get services from
their government because the money's been flat stolen.
I spoke at a conference to the Inter-American Bar
Association in Cochabamba, Bolivia,
and I tried to say, lawyers job is to keep people honest,
and you shouldn't be helping them evade the law or break
the law.
My audience began to laugh at me.
I blew up.
Why do you think you don't have clean water?
Why do you think people are so poor?
It's because you, as a group of professionals,
are teaching people how not to be participants in your society.
The fundamental question I ask is,
well, who makes money off this?
Who makes money off this industry?
And obviously, Mossack Fonseca made a lot of money,
and obviously their clients who avoid taxes,
they make a lot of money, but banks also make a lot of money,
financial institutions, Wall Street.
You can't have a major business if you don't have banks
complicit with your business.
The banks are certainly a key cog in this whole mechanism
set up to create distance between the real owners of the
money and-and-and the corporations that nominally,
have control over it, but banks donate a lot to
politicians, and uh, you know,
there you go.
The banks and the accounting firms and the law
firms, they are basically spending all of their resources
in trying to damage national treasuries in creating an
illusion of-of an economic system that works only for the
1%, and they are working to deepen that gap between the 1%
and the rest of the world.
We found David Cameron's dad in the data with
his offshore fund.
I'm very relaxed about,
publishing these things.
There's no secrets about my status.
I am paid handsomely as your Prime Minister,
and that is my main source of income,
and I have a house I used to live in before I moved into
Downing Street, and I rent that out and I get the income
from that.
I don't have other sources of income,
so there will be no surprises,
in terms of my tax affairs, but I'm very relaxed,
as I've always said.
Nothing's changed.
It wasn't even a surprise that his dad had had
a fund.
It's just that he wouldn't say he had money in it.
In order to not have the fund taxed in the UK,
you had to have majority of foreign directors on the company
board, so the third was Swiss, a third were,
were in the Bahamas, and-and everything was run out of the
Bahamas, so they had this army of people just assign things
there, so they were pretending to,
devise the investment strategy and trade gold and
bonds and things like that, but all the instructions were coming
by telephone from London.
One of the thing is we found is not only did Mossack
Fonseca have a number of Chinese companies that it registered in
Nevada as shell companies, some of those,
perhaps, to do business in the United States,
but more likely than not, to hide assets somewhere else.
Brazil was one of the, the hottest things,
and having been a correspondent there myself,
I was very interested in working with the Brazilian team.
We found payoffs to politicians.
More than $700 million in bribes had been paid.
Two-thirds of the country's legislature had been
tied to off-shore companies.
Many of the politicians were using shell companies through
Mossack Fonseca in Nevada to hide assets they owned back in,
in Brazil.
Nobody pays a bribe and says, hey,
here's a bribe.
They do it through consulting fees,
they do it through structured investments,
and they do it through shell companies that pay other
shell companies.
The papers were very clear that this problem is not
limited to small countries in Africa.
The problem is huge here in the United States.
The tax evasion problem is huge here in the United States.
There were a lot of Americans in Panama Papers,
so here's this perception that there weren't.
I think what was missing was a Putin-type big name,
but the very kind of people you'd expect to be in the Panama
Papers were in there.
All kinds of SEC fraud, pump and dump,
penny stocks, and a lot of hedge funds.
Those kinda guys who need that anonymity to make that work.
Those guys are in here in some significant numbers,
and unfortunately, that's gotten easier,
not harder in the aftermath of Trump's election.
I am officially running for President of the United
States, and we are going to make our country great again.
Having Donald Trump as the President of the United
States let me feel a little bit strange knowing that he also had
some offshore deals in his past.
He didn't pay any federal income tax, so...
That makes me smart.
If he's paid zero, that's zero for troops...
Trump is obviously one we were focused on from
the very beginning.
He appeared about 3,450 times that we know of.
That's not to say his partners.
That's just him by name.
The big find was a lot of documents around the
Panama Hotel project.
Trump Ocean Club soars over the Pacific and
Panama City.
It's also where criminals, everywhere from Russian
gangsters to money launderers for Latin American drug cartels
were able to hide their cash.
There we found contract information between him and the
developer, Newland.
One of the things I think that was very helpful in the Panama
Papers is it actually showed Trump's business model.
It was a contract that showed how he got paid,
how his name was leased.
This really wasn't known, and the documents,
here we had physical proof of how,
you know, how he arranges things.
As a former money launderer,
the Trump Ocean Club, how would you rate it in its quality.
For money laundering?
Oh, I'd say triple A.
You get control of the country,
you move your family into all of the important jobs in the
country, and then you use that as an opportunity to
enrich yourself.
The man they credit with Donald Trump's
victory, the President Elect's own son-in-law,
Jared Kushner.
What's now going on is exactly that,
and what I think is also going on is that our president has
cozied up to any number of these kleptocrats because he wants
Americans to think it's the new normal.
The central figure in the investigations
into Donald Trump's inner circle,
and possible ties to Russia.
It was Manafort...
Paul Manafort...
Long before he was president Trump's campaign
chairman, Paul Manafort was paid millions by a Russian
billionaire with close ties to Vladimir Putin.
That is the closest we've been able to get to Manafort.
Manafort seems to have been paid through companies in Belize.
I've spent a lot of time looking at these shell companies.
Donald Trump's friends, people of his cabinet,
advisors, have been active in the offshore business.
Mister Mnuchin, you ran a hedge fund for a few years
starting in 2004, and I've been trying to get my arms around the
Mnuchin web of bank accounts and shell companies.
They were in Cayman Islands and Anguilla.
How many employees did you have in Anguilla?
Treasury Secretary Nominee
we didn't have any employees in Anguilla.
How many customers did you have there?
We didn't have any customers that resided
in Anguilla.
Did you have an office there?
We did not have a office ourselves there.
So you just had a post office box?
Senator, let me explain to you, okay?
It's just a yes or no answer.
I'm already over my time.
Yes or no?
Did you just have a post office?
Well, hopefully the other senators will defer some
time so I can, I can answer this for you,
because I think it's an important issue,
but no, we had...
Mister Chairman, this is...
I think he should go ahead and answer it right now.
He should get a chance to answer the question.
Yeah.
I'm very troubled about this question of how you're
gonna unrig the system if you've got a record of taking advantage
of tax shelters that, in effect, have zero percent tax rate.
Thank you, Mister Chairman.
The taxes you pay are compulsory.
They come out of your paycheck, you can see it once or twice
a month.
There're no Cayman Island deals for you,
not, none of those kinda sweetheart overseas deals for
you the way Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, got.
Then there's another set of tax rules for the fortunate and the
well-connected.
They can pretty much decide under the tax law what they're
going to pay, when they're going to pay it,
and in some instances, almost nothing.
The problem today is really that the U.S.
is the best place to put your assets.
Over the last couple of decades,
we've seen increasingly that shell companies registered in
the U.S. are used to commit all sorts of crimes
from human trafficking to drug trafficking
to arms dealing.
The list goes on and on.
Looking to Delaware, looking to Nevada,
that's a, for example, a jurisdiction Mossack Fonseca was
very active.
We found a lot of Brazilians hiding property owned
in Brazil through Nevada offshore,
so Nevada was being used by Brazilians in a way that Cayman
Islands, Bahamas might be used by an American trying to hide
ownership of an asset.
Well, Nevada has always had this approach to raising
revenue that we wanna attack somebody else,
not the people who live here.
Though, back in the '90s, they decided to become the Delaware
of the west and tried to follow that example and make it very
easy for shell companies, LLCs, to be set up there without
having any kind of information available about who owned them
or who benefited from them.
I said, at the time, that it was,
might as well hang up a shingle and say,
"Welcome scumbags and sleaze balls" because those are the
kind of people who want to keep their information secret,
but it became a source of revenue,
so you didn't have to raise taxes.
Well, I'm afraid they're rolling back the protections
that were put in at Dodd-Frank and a lot of that was about
accountability and transparency.
Banks fought that, so they're certainly not gonna want to open
it up any further.
You can find tax havens all around the world.
They are in the U.S., they are in the UK.
Now having done six of these projects,
I would say with some certainty that the,
probably the biggest tax haven in the world is-is Britain,
and its, you know, its former colonies.
We're open for business.
We like oligarchs.
I don't want to exaggerate and say we're just a tax haven,
but you know, the-the state is-is captured by finance.
Close behind it is America,
and I think in the future, it would be great if someone gave
us, you know, Delaware leaks.
We would uncover, you know, secrets that may be bigger than
anything we've ever done before.
I call on the European Commission,
the British Parliament, the United States Congress,
and all nations to take swift action,
not only to protect whistleblowers,
but to put an end to the global abuse of corporate registers.
Tax evasion cannot possibly be fixed while elected officials
are pleading for money from the very elites who have the
strongest incentives to avoid taxes relative to any other
segment of the population.
I was actually concerned every day about the
security of this whole project because let's face the facts.
Journalists like to speak about their work.
You know, every journalist you bring in,
they're probably going to tell their life partner,
they're probably going to tell their best friends,
so the risks were going up exponentially every time you
brought somebody in.
We were so focused on the digital part that I think
you forget that a lot of journalists are going to need to
have interviews with sources,
they're going to have these interviews in bars or in cafes
or in public places, and they're not going to be conscious of the
fact that other people might be following them or listening to
their conversation.
It's funny, really, because to, generally,
toextract secrets from a journalist,
you just need to take the journalist to the bar,
buy the journalist a beer or maybe two beers,
if they're, if they're being kind of tricky,
and they will tell you everything.
My colleagues say, I haven't seen any stories.
What are you doing?
I say, it's a project.
It's a regional project, actually worldwide,
and we're just looking at something.
And they say, well, when's it coming out?
Well, I couldn't really answer.
You had this in mind the whole time that one
mistake could jeopardize the whole project.
My life, during all those months,
was kinda like a spy life.
I couldn't tell them what I was doing,
and I felt awful because, at the same time,
I was investigating my friends.
I would go to dinner parties, and during the day,
I was just searching documents that somehow mentioned them.
We felt responsible for their safety and that that
was also something we repeatedly told our colleagues.
Be aware that there is colleagues of us out there
risking their life with this reporting,
and if you tell too much, you could risk their life.
In the last weeks before our publication date,
we had to do everything to protect our source,
so we stopped all communications.
We destroyed effectively the-the devices that we used to
communicate with the source.
My iPhone and my computer.
We deleted all the files with several programs,
so run it over and over and over until it was
completely flat.
But then, again, we weren't really sure,
you know, if you really can trust this,
so, I more or less took a hammer and started
smashing the things.
We didn't want to throw it away because we were so paranoid back
then that we thoguh if someone finds it,
maybe he can do something with it.
The most dangerous moment in the investigation,
and the most tense moment, when we start reaching out to people
for comment.
If we have had a year to look at your bank information and your
company information, we are not going to surprise you.
You don't approach people and say,
listen, the team of Mossack Fonseca,
you lost all your data.
The camera crews for the broadcasters
involved in the project descended on the offices of
Mossack Fonseca in Panama City and demanded to talk to someone,
get a statement.
We sent them an email.
We saw documents that seemed to indicate that you have many
troubles with your due diligence and the way you choose
your customers.
Then it follows, um, a long list of questions.
Very detailed, very much to the cases.
So they said, we're not involved in illegal dealings.
We have never contact with the customers directly.
We only work with intermediaries, which are lies.
Well, I've heard, well now, everything might blow up.
Now it will be hundreds of lawyers trying to stop our
reporting, hundreds of people all around the world get
knowledge about our investigation,
and that's people like drug lords,
criminals, and of course we feared that something
might happen.
It was very stressful for-for all of us
because at that point, yeah, we had to call our sources,
we had to call the people that we were writing about,
and people started to know more and more and more.
We started to have a bodyguard because that's when we
received a non-direct threat by Mossack Fonseca.
So they came and said, you know, we know you have a journalist
who's helping the international media,
and she, and she's been she's been paid for,
and she is trying to diminish the reputation of
our firm and the country, and she was gonna have to,
you know, suffer the consequences.
So the paper immediately said, you know,
you can't be around without any protection.
My friends were here.
We go pick them up at the hotel, and there's,
there is a bodyguard there driving the car.
So we said, oh, it's just an Uber.
But we forgot to hide the gun he had in the middle of the
front seat.
We had to live a double life and-and that really was
something that changed our lives from that moment.
The most frightening moment for me
shortly before publication was when I personally had to write
an email to the Kremlin basically addressing it to "Dear
Mr. Vladimir Putin" and laying out what we found in regards to
this net of companies around his friend Sergei Roldugin that was
funneling hundreds of millions of dollar out of Russia,
and I've never written an email to Vladimir Putin before.
Some days later, Vladimir Putin's spokesperson,
Mr. Peskov, did a press conference in Moscow.
The documents show nothing
about Mister Putin.
Everything that was, interconnected with our
president, was written by newspapers.
It was written by journalists without having
obvious facts for that.
It was clear to me, oh, shit.
He's speaking about that email I sent some days ago.
And now we're understanding this is nothing
else by, but a reflection of,
let's say, an overwhelmed
Putin-aphobia disease that unfortunately has quite spread
now in lots of media.
It was clearly obvious that the Kremlin was pissed off.
We got a lot of legal threats and there were so many.
They were really piling up.
Everyone that we contacted recruited the best lawyers to
threaten ICIJ, to try to, um, get us to show them documents,
to try to get us to not publish the story.
Drug trafficking, income inequality, poverty.
You look at those problems in the world,
and a lot of the keys to addressing those problems are in
the Panama Papers.
Even though you feel like you, you may wake up one day and-and
have somebody in your bedroom pointing a gun at you,
you feel like youhave to keep going on this because it's
too important.
So coming from Iceland,
I knew that if I would start asking questions about the
offshore company of the Prime Minister,
early, then all the alarm bells would ring inside the
government and inside the institutions here in Iceland.
So we had to find a way to get
the reactions from the Prime Minister on camera.
So we decided after a lengthy talk about the ethical
issues, to confront him.
Mister Prime Minister,
what can you tell me about a company called Wintris?
Well, it's a company of,
if I recall correctly, which is associated with one of the
companies that I, was on a board of,
and, it was a, hadan account which as I,
as I mentioned, has been with the tax,
on the tax account since it was established.
So now I'm starting to feel a bit strange about this question
because it's like you are accusing me of something when
you are asking me about a company that has been on my...
Let, let...
tax return from
the beginning.
Yeah, it must be okay for me as a
journalist to ask the Prime Minister about personal...
Yes, sure.
But you are indicating that I have not paid, taxes on it.
No, I'm just asking you questions.
Okay,
okay.
So, so, uh, to go into the details,
I would like my partner to do it in Icelandic because I don't
have the details, uh, to discuss it.
The time between the interview and the
publication was a stressful time.
The wife of the Prime Minister,
she posted a Facebook status talking about some
attacks from the media.
Soon, I realized that, uh, we shouldn't be afraid because we
had all the materials, we had the interview,
uh, and uh, I talk, I told my staff,
you know, just relax because we are going to publish this and,
uh, it will be big.
We were utterly convinced that night that we were gonna
light the Blue Torch Paper despite nobody going beforehand,
there was still an air of expectancy.
People knew a big story was coming.
What was weird was about ten minutes before we were due
to press send, Edward Snowden tweeted out a link to the
English language website of Suüddeutsche Zeitung MAN 4: The
people who follow him then were alerted to this,
and that's a pretty wide universe.
Gerard Ryle, the Director of the ICIJ,
is hammering the phones getting everyone to just hold
their nerve.
I thought it was very important that we all hold the
line, that what was happening with the press
conference from the Kremlin and what was happening in Iceland at
the time where parts of the story were getting out through
Facebook, through the Icelandic Prime Minister's wife,
like there was a lot of nervousness,
and I really thought that all of these events,
all of these small things happening,
even though, you know, we were being talked about a week
beforehand, no one really knew the bigger story.
You know, I'm, uh, describing it a bit like a,
a general standing at the top of the hill holding back the
troops, you know, waiting as the opposing army approaches,
approaches, you know, hold, hold, hold, go!
Charge!
When that day hits,
things happen fairly quickly.
The so-called Panama Papers now exposing the
secret financial dealings of politicians and celebrities.
Many of the world's most powerful
politicians, wealthy business owners and popular celebrities
are now desperately trying to distance themselves from the
fallout and consequences of the Panama Papers.
There was an immediate response on social media.
They're all on the inside,
we are out on the street looking in.
Hello?
This thing exploded and took an entire life of its own.
We turn now to the banking bombshell causing
shockwaves around the world.
Panama Papers...
The Panama Papers...
The Panama Papers.
What may be the largest leak of secret documents
in history.
A blockbuster release of millions of
financial documents.
This is the biggest attack on the tax
shelter industry.
It's a trillion dollar industry.
It is.
It is a trillion dollar industry.
The UK, France, Australia, Mexico,
all say they're going to investigate.
When it blew up, I had no idea the size of
the situation.
Panama Police have raided the offices of the
law firm at the center of the country's massive data leak.
Now the problem is can the various judicial systems of the
world handle all of this material without getting a
horrendous case of indigestion?
We have always dealt with professional clients all
over the world, only.
After the publication, the example they gave it,
we were like a knife factory, you know?
We sell the knives.
If people kill, kill other people with knives,
it is not our fault.
The problem is they always knew who had the knives and what were
they gonna do with the knives.
The law firm is denying any wrongdoing.
When we'd realized how big it was was when we saw people
going out in the streets.
Thousands of Icelanders took the streets,
calling on the Prime Minister to resign following allegations he
benefited from offshore holdings and tax havens.
The first casualty of the Panama Papers
has fallen.
Prime Minister of Iceland yielded his post on Tuesday amid
public uproar that he failed to disclose links to an
offshore company.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, he may be thrown
out of office over allegations that his family owned several
illegal offshore businesses.
Corruption and bribery at the highest level
on the streets of Rio Sao Paulo and dozens of other cities.
Protestors laid the blame at the door of President
Dilma Rousseff.
Every day there is a new scandal.
Every day there is something related to money being taken out
of the country.
We have some breaking news from Brazil where
the senate there has voted to impeach President Dilma Rousseff
and plunges the country into political chaos.
Look at Brazil.
That's probably the country where the Panama Papers has had
the most impact.
Iceland got the headlines with the president.
The entire ruling structure of Brazil is crumbling
because so many of them are tied into this money
laundering scheme.
Protestors in the Argentine capital Buenos
Aires are calling for the country's president to step down
after the so-called Panama Papers revealed Mauricio Macri
is on the board of two offshore firms: One in the Bahamas,
the other in Panama.
Several thousand people filled a square
in Malta's capital on Sunday, and demanded the resignation of
Prime Minister Joseph Muscat.
My mother was in Malta alone,
fighting this with no, no one backing her at all.
No institution.
Daphne had been working on a number of post-Panama
Paper stories.
She wasn't involved in the Panama Papers investigation
itself, but she had taken our reporting and gone further.
Good evening.
Um, today, the, yesterday's piece...
There are no bank accounts,
uh, no, no, no funds.
And there are absolutely no funds.
Thank you.
When the story broke, they didn't resign.
I mean, I couldn't believe it.
I could see, I mean, it was like a disaster unfolding in
slow motion.
British Prime Minister David Cameron faces
backlash for implications in the recently leaked Panama Papers.
And that's when things in the UK just went
really crazy.
There was turmoil in this country.
David Cameron had the worst week.
Thank you, Mister Speaker.
With permission, I would like to make a statement on the
Panama Papers.
Dealing with my own circumstances first,
yesterday I published all the information in my tax returns,
not just for the last year, but for the last six years.
I've also given additional information about money
inherited and given to me by my family so people can see the
sources of income that I have.
This is an entirely standard practice,
and it is not to avoid tax.
May I thank the Prime Minister for the
advance site of his statement.
It is absolutely a masterclass in the art of distraction.
He refused to say whether he had any money in his
father's offshore fund.
He'd gone on record saying,
we've gotta end secrecy about tax avoidance.
He'd gone on record saying we've gotta shine a light on where
this money comes from.
Some of these schemes where people are parking huge
amounts of money offshore and taking loans back to just
minimize their tax rates, it is not morally acceptable.
So he then had to come out,
and this was the fourth or fifth explanation over a period of
three days, saying, well, actually,
I did benefit from the shares.
Samantha and I had a joint account.
We owned, uh, 5,000 units in Blaire Moore,
uh, Investment Trust, which we sold in January, uh, 2010.
Uh, that was worth something like 30,000 pounds.
Was there a profit on it?
I paid, um, income tax on the dividends,
but there was a profit on it,
but it was less than the capital gains tax allowance,
so I didn't pay capital gains tax,
but it was subject to all the UK taxes in all the normal ways.
A few months later, Britain was gonna hold a
referendum on whether to leave the European Union.
People of Britain have spoken,
voting for a British exit, dubbed Brexit,
with almost 52% of the votes choosing to leave the 28
member European Union.
And Cameron was the figurehead for Romaine,
but the British press is dominated by press barrons who
wanted us to leave, and it suited their agenda to destroy
the figurehead for Romane.
On Wednesday, I would attend the House of Commons for
Prime Ministers, answer questions, and then after that,
I expect to go to the Palace and offer my resignation,
so we'll have a new Prime Minister in that building behind
me by Wednesday evening.
Thank you very much.
Cameron helped to create this moral atmosphere which
said, look, this behavior is wrong and should not be helped
by the laws that we have in existence at the moment.
The documents show allies to Russian President Vladimir
Putin secretly shuffled as much as $2 billion through
banks and shadow companies.
Day one, of course, was Vladimir Putin and the two
$2 billion worth of money that led back to him,
which was a remarkable story.
It's been one of international journalism's holy grails,
really, that story.
The papers revealed the identity of a suspiciously
rich cellist, which raises immediate red flags for me,
'cause I always thought the only way to make millions with a
cello is to use it to dig for gold.
You know, he's basically saying we're all spies.
We scheme dastardly stuff to try and defame the
Russian Federation.
Now, of course that isn't the case,
and if it were a CIA plot...
how come David Cameron got sucked in?
How come demonstrations in Iceland
and Argentina?
I mean the hilarious thing,
you know, is that Putin ended up having to buy lots of cellos.
Roldugin bought lots of cellos because he said it was for
buying cellos, so they went and bought a lot of cellos after.
This wasn't on official news in Russia.
Unless you were looking at foreign media,
you had no idea that the Panama Papers broke.
The officials who were implicated in these documents
would retaliate against journalists.
It's real.
Journalists have been killed.
A car exploded in flames in the Ukrainian
capital of Kiev early Wednesday morning inside a prominent
journalist, Pavel Sheremet.
An eye witness to the blast says several people
tried to pull Sheremet from the car, but it appeared
he was already dead.
In Russia, journalists, um,
both in the big cities and the provinces,
get killed, shot, beaten to death.
Roman Anin who works for Novaya Gazeta,
he was kind of instrumental in, in chasing the,
following the money all the way to Putin and making that kind
of connection.
The Kremlin pretty soon found out who our Russia
partners are, so there was TV programs that were,
that basically screamed something like,
"Wanted" posters of the two of them putting out information,
um, on them, detailed information that could lead
people to the place where they work or potentially where
they live.
They, to a certain point, left Russia for a while.
We were treated as, uh, traitors.
There were publications all over the social networks and
everywhere blaming us for selling our country,
blaming us for treason.
Theywere people saying, "What should we do with a
traitor journalist?"
with our names.
They said, well, should we throw them off the bridge of
the canal?
Should we send them to Punta Coco,
which is equivalent of Alcatraz for Panama,
or should we just send them to La Joya,
which is a maximum security prison.
This sort of thing is happening
a lot of, a lot of places in the world,
it's absolutely terrifying.
Me personally, I've been physically threatened,
I've been threatened with lawsuits.
Um, but I'm really lucky.
I, you know, I work in the United States.
It's really bad form to kill a journalist here.
Investigative journalism is hard enough without having to worry,
do all that kind of moral math, um,
physical risk.
It's something that war correspondents are used to doing
all the time.
In a way, it kind of feels like we're all war
correspondents now.
This just shows how vulnerable reporters around the
world working on corruption issues are.
One answer to that vulnerability is working in networks and
in teams.
You can't take down 376 reporters.
For the Panama Papers,
reporting that explored the hidden infrastructure and global
scale of offshore tax havens...
The Pulitzer Prize and explanatory reporting goes
to... The International Consortium of Investigative
Journalists, McClatchy and the Miami Herald.
Just the idea that we were able to-to finish the
Panama Papers despite all of the doubts and publish it along with
all of these other reporters all across the world.
And it felt so surreal because the Pulitzer is
something you always dream of as a journalist,
but as a German journalist, it's something that you can normally
not reach.
It's nice to show that journalists can actually work
together, and I think that's something that we always thought
would never happen.
You know, journalists are selfish,
we don't share stories, we don't share sources.
We've just proven that that's wrong,
that, in fact, you can get a better story sometimes if you
do, if you do share.
You do need big, international teams to cover
big, international topics.
Then it cleared the way for us to spend the rest of the
year really doing the kind of stuff that you couldn't do on
the first day, but were just as important as the first
day stories.
I thought that this would be the time that we can
refocus and go into the stories we hadn't yet the time to
finish, but then we heard this terrible news from Malta where
Daphne Galizia, um, was killed in a-a car bombing.
The son of the investigative journalist,
Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed in a car bomb attack in
Malta has attacked the island as a mafia state run by what he
called crooks.
His 53-year-old mother, who was killed yesterday,
was known for her blog accusing politicians of high-level
corruption and she led the Panama Papers investigation into
corruption on the island.
We couldn't have been more shocked when-when we found
out that Daphne, you know, Matthew's mother,
had been blown up.
I mean, it just seemed so senseless and-and crazy.
It was, the message was,
look, we can, we can do this and we can get away with it.
We have, there's no deterrent.
We can strike whoever we want, whenever we want and get away
with it.
The fact that she was killed in Malta,
you're talking about a European country.
That really shocked not just us, but also the world.
You know, this, what happened to Daphne,
it-it never, we never thought anything could happen in Malta.
Daphne was, you know, very much a,
a fearless investigator.
You know, a, a lone, a lone voice in a sense.
She was very frustrated with-with mainstream media.
I don't know.
People just gravitated towards her blog naturally.
Daphne was fierce, and she was a blogger,
so she had a lot more freedom than newspaper journalists in
terms of expressing her opinion, and she used it.
My article went up at 7:00 in the evening,
and two and a half hours later, by half past nine,
the police are already at my gate with a warrant for my
arrest issued by a magistrate within two and a half hours.
The police cannot understand why I will not abide by the law and
sit at home quietly and not write anything about politics.
She was one addressing things many politicians did not
want to hear.
She wrote about corruption at the highest levels
of government.
You know, I mean I always get,
like, you know, the-the usual people,
"Don't worry, the truth will come to light.
Good always wins.
There will be justice."
My mother always thought that was bullshit.
She wasn't just outspoken.
She was effective, and I think that's why she's-she's
been killed.
What was particularly shocking was that,
for some people, um, this assassination was a-a cause
of celebration.
One police officer actually tweeted that he was pleased that
this had happened and-and called her "cow dung" the day after,
so you know, there wasn't universal condemnation of this
act in Malta.
Perhaps there should have been.
A court in Malta has charged three men with
the murder of Daphne Caruana Galiza.
Maltase media say the authorities honed in on the
suspects following telephone intercepts.
Police arrested 10 men on on Monday in connection with
the killing.
Seven have been released on bail pending further inquiries.
It was just all a big show.
I am quite confident that they were the people who
executed the orders to assassinate my mother,
but my mother never wrote about them,
she never investigated them, she had no idea who they were.
They've probably never even read what she wrote.
They may have the people who-who pushed a button,
who-who, you know, who set off the bomb,
but they're definitely not the masterminds,
and they definitely, you know, wouldn't have had the motive to
do it, so the big question is, you know,
who ordered this kill, and ultimately,
who paid them, as well?
The way it was done, it was also a way of getting
sources to stop talking.
The two founders of Panamanian law firm
Mossack Fonseca were arrested after both were indicted on
charges of money laundering.
Porcell, I think, is trying to do what has to be
done, but the judiciary, which is where she has to deposit
her investigations, has zero credibility at this point.
If you talk to Panamanians out there about this,
the reaction is "No pasa nada"...
Nothing will happen.
I don't think that's right.
I think that something will happen.
We have an ex-president of the Supreme Court in jail.
We have an ex-president in jail in Miami.
I mean, there are things happening.
I feel that somewhere along the way,
in incremental bits, we'll be solving these problems.
It's just a, a human problem that we have to face all over
the world.
This is not only about Panama,
that's a worldwide problem, and if it should get solved,
it's something that has to be addressed in the U.S.,
as well.
One of the things that led to change on the U.S.
end that both Nevada and Wyoming changed their laws based on some
of what we were able to show about these nominee directors
that really weren't contacts.
And the UK government is now supporting efforts to force
transparency in overseas tax havens that do that by
introducing public registries across the
commonwealth countries.
Panama Papers hasn't ended yet.
It's still going.
Every week, there's a new Panama Papers development.
Reporters are still in the database and are still searching
and still finding things that we missed.
While there have been a lot of investigations launched,
including in the U.S., and there have been a number of people all
across the world who have been arrested,
there has been an element of inaction in areas that really
matter, reform that would prevent these offshores from
being created in the way they are created.
There was a lot of talk about it,
but yet, that hasn't happened in a significant way.
I think history has shown that as important as
Panama Papers are in revealing this kind of underbelly of
global finance and how it ties into the whole inequality
question, I think it also will probably lead to a
better mousetrap.
Will the scams go on?
Will there be new ways found?
Yes, of course.
You know, they, it-it, you know, the world will probably just get
a bit more sophisticated.
There's a democratic backsliding in the world in
general, and I think that this is taking journalism down
with it.
It's kind of strange that, at that same time,
it's a golden age for investigative journalism.
Our work has never been as important as it is now.
But when it takes a whistleblower to sound
the alarm, it is cause for even greater concern.
It signals that democracy's checks and balance have all
failed, that the breakdown is systemic,
and that severe instability could be just around the corner.
So now is the time for real action.