Panama Papers (2016): Global publication · 533

On 3 April 2016 ICIJ and more than a hundred outlets began publishing 11.5 million files from Panama firm Mossack Fonseca, a leak that toppled governments and left a mixed dock of inquiries. On 3 April 2016, after a year of coordinated reporting, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) began publishing stories drawn from 11.5 million files — about 2.6 terabytes — from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. The source used the name John Doe. More than a hundred newsrooms in dozens of countries worked from a shared cache. The files described shell companies, trusts and the clients who used them, including heads of government, relatives of officials and well-known business figures.

Political shock was immediate. Iceland's prime minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, resigned after a televised confrontation about an offshore company. In Pakistan, the Supreme Court disqualified Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 2017 in a case that grew from the leak. Britain's then prime minister, David Cameron, faced questions about his late father's offshore interests. Other names — including associates of Vladimir Putin, denied by the Kremlin — drove a week of global headlines. Mossack Fonseca shut down in 2018.

A leak that became a global civic file The Panama Papers are the type case of cross-border investigative journalism: a named firm, a dated dump, a consortium and a scatter of national outcomes rather than one dock. Mossack Fonseca, based in Panama City, was a large incorporator of offshore companies. The leaked material included emails, contracts and corporate registries spanning decades. ICIJ's public database later listed officers and intermediaries; it did not publish every raw email. Scale in this atlas is about the size of the cache and the geographic spread of names, not a single stolen cash total.