The 11.9m files in the Pandora papers are the biggest trove of leaked offshore data in history and expose the trouble to which rich and powerful elites will go to shelter their fortunes in offshore tax havens. They reveal the secret offshore affairs of 35 world leaders and shine a light on the secret finances of more than 300 other public officials in at least 90 countries. Not everyone named is accused of wrongdoing. But using companies or trusts incorporated in tax havens, the rich can ensure their assets remain hidden, and sometimes that enables tax avoidance.
The files – which took up a whopping 2.94 terabytes of disk space – were leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in Washington, and shared with select media partners including the Guardian. This week’s Guardian Weekly gives an overview of this huge investigation: the full Pandora papers series can be found here.
The life sentencing last week of former London police officer Wayne Couzens for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard has raised hard truths for the Metropolitan police force. Mark Townsend examines the culture of misogyny in the Met that shielded the guilty man, while Alexandra Topping considers how the case’s grim details have heightened women’s sense of despair about levels of sexual violence in the UK.
For many of us, isolation has been a defining aspect of the Covid-19 pandemic. Last year, the writer Stephanie Theobald came up with a novel way of riding out the crisis – relocating to a cave in California’s Mojave desert. She reveals how the experience affected her inner peace – and her fear of spiders – in our features section.
There’s also a fascinating long read into the life and work of Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive psychologist whose liberal-friendly ideas on human progress have made him a darling of business leaders but an enemy of those who see him as another white male defender of the scientific establishment.
