Paradise Papers (2017)

Figure 1: Artwork of Offshoring, in association with Paradise Papers [Source: Rocco Fazzari / ICIJ ]

Overview

The Paradise Papers are a set of 13.4 million electronic files that were leaked from an unknown source to the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. Afterwards, Süddeutsche Zeitung shared the leaked files with the Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) which collaborated with more than 380 journalists across the globe. Some details were made public on 5 November 2017

The Paradise Paper documents contain details of offshore investments. The documents contain emails, loan agreements and other forms of paperwork from the offshore legal firm Appleby, corporate service providers Estera and Asiacti,, as well as company registries from 19 tax jurisdictions.

According to the BBC, the name “Paradise Papers” originates from the term for which many offshore jurisdictions are dubbed, being coined with names like “tax havens” and “tax paradises”.

Details

On 20 October 2017, a now deleted Reddit account hinted at the existence of the papers, mentioning the word “Pandora” at the end of the post. The Following month, the ICIJ confronted and accused the offshore legal firm Appleby for its associations to the Paradise Papers.

Appleby announced that there was "no evidence of wrongdoing", and that "are unfounded and based on a lack of understanding of the legitimate and lawful structures used in the offshore sector."

On December 18 2017, Appleby pressed charges against the ICIJ's UK parters, being the BBC and the Guardian, in an attempt to seek damages for both the disclosure of what it claimed were confidential legal documents obtained in a hack, and disclosure of any documents that had informed the news organizations’ reporting, according to the Guardian On May 4 of the next year, Appleby dropped the charges against the Guardian and the BBC coming to a settlement instead.

People and Companies associated

The papers contain the names of over 120 000, with notable figures with financial affairs associated in the papers including, but not limited to, former Prime Ministers of Canada Jean Chrétien and Brian Mulroney, current King of the UK Prince Charles and the former Queen Elizabeth II, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, the Queen of Jordan Noor al-Hussein and former President of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos.

The papers also contained the names of many notable companies, including, Apple for transferring billions in intangible assets to a subsidiary located in Ireland to exploit a tax incentive known as capital allowance, Nike for transferring ownership of its Swoosh trademark to a Bermudian subsidiary, Nike International Ltd, converting what would be taxable profits to Bermuda, which does not have taxes, as well as several others like McDonald's, Glencore, Uber, Twitter(X) and DST Global.