The scenario is now well established: a whistleblower requests a consortium of investigative journalists, to whom he hands over a mass of raw data with offshore accounts and shell companies, which is shared between media outlets around the world, who will work on months to uncover the fraudsters and criminal networks behind the straw men. The rest is also now known: tax and legal investigations are launched by the hundreds, which bring back into the public coffers the money hidden in tax havens.
International collaborative investigations conducted by the media have enabled many States to recover significant sums. The “Panama Papers” alone, published in 2016, brought in more than 1.1 billion euros in taxes and penalties globally, according to a 2021 assessment. France, for its part, raked in nearly 200 million euros thanks to the “Panama Papers” and the “Paradise Papers”, published in 2017, according to an evaluation of 2023. And the counter continues to tick.
If the “Panama Papers” and their revelations on the billions of dollars hidden in the Caribbean were the high point of these “Leaks” explosive (“data leaks”), creating a global shock wave, it all started ten years ago. It was in fact in April 2013 that the first investigation of its kind appeared, the “Offshore Leaks”, the result of fifteen months of an investigation carried out by more than thirty media outlets, including already, in France, The world.
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For the very first time, a leak of secret files on offshore finance on an unprecedented scale – 126 times more massive than the diplomatic cables of WikiLeaks, the organization of Julian Assange – reaches the American investigative consortium ICIJ (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists), thanks to anonymous former employees of companies specializing in this market. These documents reveal the existence of 120,000 offshore companies, created in the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands, to evade money from the tax authorities or hide the proceeds of other offenses (embezzlement of public money, corruption, trafficking drugs, etc.). Their owners, suddenly revealed, are wealthy individuals, wealthy entrepreneurs and high-level political figures.
The “Offshore Leaks” will be the start of a long series of long-term investigations (“LuxLeaks”, “SwissLeaks”, “Paradise Papers”, “OpenLux”, etc.), which modernize the investigation, mixing the analysis of massive data to field journalism, according to the rule of “follow the money” − which consists of tracing the origin of the funds or following their destination.
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