The Pandora papers are the largest trove of leaked offshore data in history, containing more than 11.9m files from a total of 14 offshore service providers.
The records provide a rare window into the hidden world of offshore finance, casting light on the financial secrets of some of the world’s richest people. They show how global corporations, world leaders and billionaire individuals can avail of the secrecy offered by networks of companies registered in offshore jurisdictions to keep their transactions from public view.
The sheer size of the project is hard to fathom: 11.9m files making up 2.94 terabytes of data, making it the largest such project handled by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), with whom the Guardian partnered, by volume.
To put this into context, if you were to download the combined Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel you would use up 6.8MB on your Kindle: 2.94TB is more than 400,000 times that. It is 220,000 times the storage required for Shakespeare’s complete works and 990,000 times bigger than the storage capacity required for the Bible.
Put another way, this volume of data would allow you to stream Netflix in high definition 24/7 for 41 days running.
No wonder then, that it has taken more than 600 journalists representing 151 media organisations in 117 countries and territories to make sense of the information contained in the files.
The international tax system allows rich individuals to shift ownership of their assets to companies registered on the other side of the world, often in countries to which the owner has no other connection.
Moving money offshore is not illegal, and there are legitimate reasons why some people do it. People living under repressive regimes sometimes use offshore providers to put their assets beyond the reach of political enemies.
But the system enables some of the world’s wealthiest companies and individuals to operate in secrecy and to hide assets from public view. Anonymity can make it easier for the proceeds of crime or corruption to be laundered and filtered through the financial system undetected.
