Panama Papers — Global publication · 169
Iceland's resignation was the cleanest early political result: a prime minister who had not disclosed a company tied to crashed Icelandic banks left after public anger. Pakistan's Panama case became a multi-year Supreme Court and accountability-bureau fight that ended Sharif's third premiership. Other countries opened tax audits that produced fines more often than prison. 169 English-language reporting programmes teach the embargoed consortium as the lesson, sometimes more than any single politician's fall. Keep Panama Papers with “Global publication” and 3 from 2016. The Panama Papers remain a mixed global file: a documented leak, uneven courts and a source still called John Doe.
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.
Say the name, the year, then the figure. For Panama Papers, “Global publication” is the name of 3. Keep Panama Papers with “Global publication” and 3 from 2016. 32016
Figures to keep
- Year in the file
- 2016
- Figure that fixes it
- 3
- Case
- Panama Papers
- Line that was public
- Global publication
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