LAHORE (Staff Report) – The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has published a searchable database of nearly 214,000 offshore companies created in 21 jurisdictions, including Nevada, Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands, based on the leak of 11.5 million documents, collectively known as the Panama Papers.
The released data features as many as 259 names of Pakistanis who own companies in different tax havens. Over 50% them are residents of Karachi while over 100 hundred names used Lahore addresses to register companies abroad.
He is full list of the Pakistani owners of offshore companies:
According to ICIJ, the released data also displays information about more than 100,000 additional offshore entities that were disclosed by ICIJ in its 2013 Offshore Leaks investigation.
However, ICIJ has not published all leaked information in its possession, such as raw documents or personal information of the owners, bank account details, email exchanges and financial transactions contained in the documents.
Related – Panama Papers: List of Pakistanis named in second installment of massive documents leak
The massive tranche of data was originally obtained from an anonymous source by reporters at the German newspaper Süeddeustche Zeitung, who asked ICIJ to organize a global reporting collaboration to analyze the files. Afterwards, more than 370 reporters in nearly 80 countries probed the files for a year.
The in-depth investigation uncovered the secret offshore holdings of 12 world leaders, more than 128 other politicians and scores of fraudsters, drug traffickers and other criminals whose companies have been blacklisted in the US and elsewhere.
Last week, the anonymous leaker of the Panama Papers, known only as “John Doe,” spoke publicly for the first time in a written statement and called out for concrete steps to combat tax havens.
“In the European Union, every member state’s corporate register should be freely accessible, with detailed data plainly available on ultimate beneficial owners,” the source wrote.
Doe added that the US “can clearly no longer trust its fifty states to make sound decisions about their own corporate data.”
The Panama Papers database is accessible at https://offshoreleaks.icij.org, and people around the world can access it, as per the local laws of their countries.
Graphics Courtesy: ICIJ, The News International
