Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-based law firm, has been the subject of a major data leak that dwarfs even the Wikileaks case.
The news of the data leak first broke over the weekend as various news websites over the internet began publishing their findings. News sources such as The Guardian and the BBC have begun publishing some of their findings over what is now called ‘the Panama Papers’.
So what exactly are the Panama Papers? It is a collection of 11 million documents that are 2.7TB large in total. Those documents show how individuals and organizations, and sometimes even governments, attempt to evade taxation by ‘investing’ in shell companies.
The leak of these documents began last year when an anonymous source contacted the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and submitted encrypted internal documents from Mossack Fonseca. With 2.7TB of data to sif through, SZ decided to cooperate with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in order to speed up the work. Thus far, a total of 400 journalists from 100 media organizations in over 80 countries have worked on the Panama Papers.
Information from the Panama Papers have implicated a huge number of people, ranging from celebrities to politicians, a list of which can be found here.
Do keep in mind that the Panama Papers are huge and only a small portion of the Papers have been published so far. Do expect more information surrounding the Papers to be published over the next few weeks.
Source: Süddeutsche Zeitung, The Guardian, BBC, ICIJ
