Panama Papers (2016): Sunday, 3 April

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.

The status is mixed because journalism produced resignations, inquiries and some convictions, not a single world court verdict. Many uses of offshore vehicles were legal. Some were not. This page records the leak, the consortium method and the public aftershocks. It does not explain how to hide assets or how to build a shell.

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.