Panama Papers are 11.5 million leaked files that contains the details about finance information of 214,488 offshore entities. This information is leaked by anonymous source from the world’s fourth biggest law firm Mossack Fonseca’s database in 2015.
What is Panama Papers?
Basically, information of some wealthy individuals and public officials of different countries are stored secretively in these papers. Some of the offshore reporters found that Mossack Fonseca is hiding the information of these business entities and use it for some illegal purposes, frauds and tax evasions. Whistleblower of this controversy is “John Doe” a pseudonym, who leaked all the information to Bastian Obermayer, a German Journalist of Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.
The original person behind Panama Papers is still anonymous even after the brief investigation by journalists of the newspaper. The reason why he leaked all this information as he mentioned in the papers is income inequality. As said by the sources he leaked the documents because “simply because I understood enough about their contents to realize the scale of the injustices they described.”
Süddeutsche Zeitung also took help of ICIJ to investigate the all the stuff because the amount of data is too large. 107 journalists from different media organizations of 80 countries are selected to analyze the documents briefly. On April 3, 2016, the first news story about the Panama Papers is published along with 150 documents. Later on, certain laws are made to stop this type of fraud by sharing the tax information of offshore individuals with their respective countries.
After this leak, Mossack Fonseca reported their clients that it was an email hack. Although, through an investigation it comes in notice that their emails are not encrypted and also, they are using three years old version of Drupal – a open source content management framework, which also contact numerous bugs.
Tax Havens are some regions or countries where taxes are very low or you can say negligible. They attract individuals and businesses to come there, invest and pay very less taxes for their business. Also, these tax havens will keep the information secret from there originate country. Mossack Fonseca is the firm who invest the property of individuals and businesses in tax havens to avoid taxes and keep all the information secure.
Nawaz Sharif Panama Papers Controversy
On 28th of July, 2017, supreme court Judge Ejaz Afzal Khan disqualified Nawaz Sharif from the prime minister post and advices the ruling party PML-N to find a replacement. This is all because of the corruption case against Nawaz Sharif. Since he has been disqualified as the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif Contact Details have been kept secret for his privacy. When the list of Panama Papers is leaked in 2016, the name of Nawaz Sharif is corrupted list. After the complete investigation by some military and civilian investigators, they come to the point that there is a significant disparity in between the Sharif and his family’s income.
Not only Nawaz Sharif, but his daughter Maryam Nawaz Sharif, sons Hasan and Hussain are also involved in Panama Papers. The main point is the legitimacy of the funds, which is used by Nawaz Sharif and his family to purchase some offshore properties in London and other countries also. Also, Maryam Nawaz Sharif Contact Details and all other information is yet to be revealed as they have underground after the supreme court verdict
