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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
World
Matthew Weaver (now) Martin Farrer and Christopher Knaus (earlier)

Reaction around the world to release of Paradise Papers – live

Sam Gyimah, a prisons ministers, reckons changes made by David Cameron’s government have made it “almost impossible” to evade tax using offshore accounts.

Tax lawyer Dan Neidle, a partner Clifford Chance, takes a swipe at the Guardian over what he claims is a lack of context about the Guardian Media Group’s non-UK investment in the reporting of the Paradise Papers. He has made similar points about the BBC and the Times (see earlier).

Repeating his call for a public inquiry, the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, said tax avoidance on this scale had a huge impact on the economy.

Speaking to Today he said: “To have such a large number of rich individuals avoiding their taxes means that we don’t have the taxes to pay for vital public services like our NHS, like education, like the care of our children by local councils.

“It means, basically, we’ve gone through seven years of austerity unnecessarily, because if the taxes would have been paid we would have been able to afford the public services and not had the scale of cuts we’ve had.”

Among possible remedies, he said, would be a new tax enforcement unit in HMRC, and a move to bar companies which use offshore schemes from getting government contracts.

“There’s a lot of these companies that actually have contracts with our government. So we’re paying them money, and the money is then going into tax havens. I’d like to end those companies who are engaged in tax avoidance having public contracts,” he said.

McDonnell also said there should be consequences for British overseas territories which operate as tax havens, with the possibility of a so-called withholding tax on money originating from such places.

Of the territories, he said: “If they wish to have any dealings with this country, I’d expected them to abide by at least minimum standards of openness and transparency.”

A withholding tax would be introduced alongside other European countries, to their economic activity is taxed to make up for lost revenues.

India’s union minister Jayant Sinha has insisted that offshore transactions listed in the Paradise Papers were not made for “any personal purpose”

The Omidyar Network, where Sinha had worked as managing director, had invested in a US company, D.Light Design, that has a subsidiary in Cayman Islands, the papers reveal, according to the Press Trust of India.

He tweeted: “It is crucial to note that these transactions were done for D.Light as an Omidyar representative, and not for any personal purpose.”

Opposition leader TS Singh Deo pointed out that Narendra Modi had promised to redistribute Indian money invested offshore before he became prime minister.

Updated

Dan Neidle, a tax lawyer at Clifford Chance, calls for more context about how media companies invest their own wealth in the reporting of the Paradise Paper revelations.

McDonnell calls for a public inquiry into tax avoidance

John McDonnell
John McDonnell Photograph: James McCauley/REX/Shutterstock

The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, called for a public inquiry into tax avoidance, saying people will be “outraged” to hear of its scale.

Speaking to Sky News he said: “What is happening is the super rich are avoiding paying their taxes like the rest of us and, as a result of that, not funding our public services. We’ve gone through seven years of austerity - real cuts in our NHS, in education, care of the elderly, care of our children - and largely now... because the super rich are just not paying their taxes.”

McDonnell said the Duchy of Lancaster, which the papers revealed has invested some of the Queen’s wealth offshore, should be included in any inquiry.

But he said the issue was much wider than the investments no behalf of the queen.

“I think we want openness and transparency overall... Of course it will [raise some eyebrows that the queen is involved] and the Duchy of Lancaster that manages those funds has to be held to account.

“But it’s not just them. The [disclosures] just demonstrate the scale of tax avoidance that’s going on. That’s why we published a call 18 months ago for a proper openness and transparency programme so that people can know what’s going on.

“I think we need now a full public inquiry because we’ve heard from the government time and time again that they’re tackling this issue, we now know they’re not tackling it effectively.

“What we need is a public inquiry on tax avoidance overall. We also need full publication of registers of beneficiaries of these trusts.”

Updated

One of India’s richest politicians, Ravindra Kishort Sinha, said he had taken a vow of silence after being asked about the Paradise Papers.

Hindi speakers have translated a note he handed to journalists as saying: “I have taken a vow of silence for seven days for Bhagwat Yadnya” [a reference to a religious festival].

Ravindra Kishore Sinha's vow of silence

Thanks to Varun Kanade, Neeti Biyani, Jishnu Prathap, Paritosh Bapat, Farhan B Abdulkareem, and Anand Deshpande who all emailed in a translation.

During her interview on the Today programme, Margaret Hodge also said she believed the queen, whose private wealth has been invested offshore on her behalf, had been badly advised.

“I think the Queen herself would be completely shocked to find that her advisers have used tax havens in which to invest their monies and that her reputation has been sullied by the reactions of the tax advisers.”

“What this demonstrates is how ingrained in our culture this moving you money round the world, how ingrained that has become into the culture and accepted. And that’s what’s wrong with it.”

“Britain used to be a trusted nation. Our legal systems are trusted, our finance systems are trusted, this is a good place to put your money. Actually, we’ve become the place of choice now - us and our tax havens - for people to hide dirty money.”

Hodge added that avoiding tax was morally wrong.

“I think if we want to build a fair society, we have to be serious about tackling the tax avoidance and evasion, which at is the heart of the inequality. And, if we want to tackle tax avoidance and evasion, that means clamping down.”

One of the things that we all do as members of society coming together, is we agree to give - according to our wealth and according to our income - into the common pot for the common good. That’s part of our social contract, that’s the moral dimension to this argument.”

“And the legal dimension is, if people didn’t want Ashcroft, you or me to pay higher tax - if parliament didn’t want that - they’d say that in their laws. Avoiding and evading those laws is wrong.”

Here’s what happened when Panorama’s Richard Bilton confronted Tory donor Lord Ashcroft with questions about the Paradise Papers.

“Dear, dear, dear” was all he would say before disappearing into the toilets at the Conservative Party conference.

Margaret Hodge
Margaret Hodge Photograph: Richard Gardner/REX

Margaret Hodge, the former chair of parliament’s public accounts committee and an outspoken critic of tax avoidance, defended herself against the allegation of hypocrisy over an offshore fund set up by her father.

She said it was not her who set it up, but her father and her uncles “at the time when they were escaping from Hitler in Germany”.

Hodge told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think what they did was wrong. I think the moment we uncovered it, we closed it. But I think it was at a very different time when they were escaping from Hitler and all that that entailed.”

Hodge added: “Our British tax havens are at the heart of a lot of this hiding of wealth and using tax havens to avoid paying taxes.”

And she acknowledged that unilateral action by the UK would likely result in money simply being moved. “Of course we’ve got to work internationally to ensure that tax havens elsewhere are closed. But should that really become the excuse for our inaction? If the countries like Bermuda or the Isle of Mann really rely on dirty money to create their wealth, that’s not sustainable over time.”

“Let’s use our money to support other investment and other growth. Don’t let’s use the fact they haven’t got other industries as an excuse for dirty money.”

The Premier of Bermuda, David Burt, has defended his country’s tax laws and accused Labour MP Margaret Hodge of hypocrisy for criticising the island’s arrangements.

Hodge told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Bermuda was using “dirty money” to create wealth and criticised the Duchy of Lancaster for sullying the Queen’s reputation by investing her money in such tax havens.

Burt replied: “Dame Margaret Hodge is clearly misinformed. For her to say that dirty and money laundering and Bermuda is a complete fabrication. We have a world class reputation of having a robust regulatory regime.”

He added: “It is also the height of hypocrisy for Dame Margaret Hodge to state when her family are beneficiaries of an oversees trust.”

Burt promised that Bermuda would review revelations contained in the Paradise Papers, but he added: “Bermuda is an excellent place to raise capital, but it is a very bad place to hide capital. You cannot hide money in Bermuda because any international tax authority can make requests and find out that information.”

He claimed Bermuda’s register of ownership was not secret. “Bermuda has known who the beneficial owners of our companies have been for 70 years, that is far in excess of many countries around the world, including the United Kingdom and the United States.”

Asked whether Queen should be proud of having money invested in Bermuda, Burt said: “Her majesty the Queen, just like any other person, should be able to invest their money where they like.”

The Asian News International has footage of one of India’s richest politicians, Ravindra Kishort Sinha, being confronted by journalists after the Paradise Papers revealed he is linked to two offshore companies.

He said nothing, but wrote note to journalists. If you can translate what it said please let us know (matthew.weaver@theguardian.com).

Updated

My colleague Matthew Weaver will be taking over the blog now. Thanks for reading.

For a slighter different take on the Paradise story, look no further than Guardian Australia’s cartoonist First Dog On The Moon. With typical acerbic wit, he dissects the issues and asks “should we eat the rich?”.

The shockwaves from the Paradise leak have passed around the world. In Indonesia, the authorities are reportedly investigating whether former presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto and the children of the country’s former dictator, Suharto, have broken tax laws after they were named in the documents. Here’s the full story.

Still in Australia and the aforementioned shadow assistant treasury spokesman, Andrew Leigh, has penned his thoughts for Guardian Australia. Describing how tax havens make it make it “frighteningly easy for firms to divert profits onto their sunny tax-free shores”, he pledges that Labor will shine a light on the schemes.

He writes:

Labor will demand companies report use of tax havens as a material tax risk to their shareholders, and create a publicly accessible register so we know the true owners of companies.
If a company wants to tender for a major government project, it must disclose its country of tax domicile. If you are headquartered in Belize rather than Brisbane, taxpayers have a right to know. For superannuation funds, we will work with the industry to develop guidelines for tax haven investment.

Read the full piece by clicking the link below.

Updated

The Paradise Papers have made significant waves in Australia where the former treasurer Wayne Swan tweeted a speech in parliament in which he argued that there would be no crackdown on offshore tax schemes when public officials such as the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, continued to use the same things for his own fortune.

Updated

I’m going to hand our coverage over to my colleague, Martin Farrer. Thanks for sticking with me this morning. Martin will keep you abreast of further reaction and developments as they happen.

You would have already seen our story on Lord Ashcroft, the major Conservative party donor in the UK. The Paradise Papers show Ashcroft used the Bermuda-based Punta Gorda Trust to shelter part of his vast wealth.

But you may not have seen Ashcroft’s reaction to the BBC, who tracked him down to pose questions about the trust and his tax affairs. Ashcroft’s only response was to mutter “dear, dear, dear”, repeatedly, before eventually seeking refuge in the toilet.

The Ashcroft story is big news in Australia, too. Ashcroft is one of the Liberal party’s biggest donors. Ashcroft’s gifts to the Liberal party included a single donation of A$1m in November 2005. Earlier this year, Ashcroft caught up with the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has built an interactive that allows you to visually explore the links of politicians and offshore tax havens. The Paradise Papers reveal the secretive dealings of more than 120 politicians and leaders worldwide.

You can access the interactive here.

The Paradise Papers have been investigated and reported by journalists from 67 countries, including India. The Indian Express has found 714 links to Indian individuals and companies in the cache of documents. The paper has splashed the investigation all over its front page.

In the United States, Democrats are calling for an inquiry into Wilbur Ross’s business links to Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law. The Paradise Papers reveal that Ross has a holding in a shipping company that does lucrative business with a firm co-owned by Kirill Shamalov, who is married to the Russian president’s daughter. The link means Ross stands to benefit from the operations of a Russian company controlled by close allies and family of Putin.

Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said Ross had misled Congress and the US public by concealing his ongoing stake in the company, Navigator.

“Only after a thorough investigation can Americans be sure Secretary Ross really has their best interests at heart,” said Blumenthal.

It’s worth keeping in mind that the last major offshore leak, the 2016 Panama Papers, is still causing reverberations around the world. The first stories about the Panama Papers, a leak from law firm Mossack Fonseca, were published 19 months ago. Just last month, a team of Bolivian journalists used the leak to reveal the connections between Bolivia and 127 offshore companies in the tax havens of Panama and the British Virgin Islands.

The team showed how Bolivian politicians and businessmen used Mossack Fonseca to create offshore entities.

Still in Australia, and Oxfam Australia has added its voice to calls for the government to enforce country-by-country tax disclosure for multinationals. Chief executive Helen Szoke praised the Labor opposition’s tax transparency model, which would force corporations to make their tax affairs public for every country in which they operate.

“Oxfam is again calling on the federal government to follow suit and introduce public country-by-country reporting as the first step in stemming the billions of dollars being siphoned offshore to tax havens, and to make the register of beneficial ownership public,” Szoke said.

“Tax transparency, which requires multinationals to publish their profits, taxes and assets for every country in which they operate, is an essential step to fight global tax avoidance,” she said.

“Making this information public would mean we don’t have to rely on leaks and scandals to find out if companies are paying their fair share.”

Updated

The political argument about the consequences of the Paradise Papers has already started in Australia.

We reported earlier this morning that Australian treasurer Scott Morrison has dismissed the Labor opposition’s calls for comprehensive country-by-country reporting of tax data.

He says companies would refuse to share their information with tax officials if they knew the information would be released publicly.

Now Andrew Leigh, Labor’s shadow assistant treasurer, has hit back, saying the claim is nonsense because the sky hasn’t fallen in in other jurisdictions where companies’ tax data is made publicly available.

“Australian law requires country-by-country reports to be submitted to the Australian Taxation Office. Making those global operation details available for public scrutiny won’t turn off that information,” he told Guardian Australia.

“The European Union have already moved on public country-by-country reporting, with some sectors operating under the European Union tax transparency regime for years, while the United Kingdom is able to release such reports publicly under regulations.

“Some major Australian firms already report country-by-country tax on a voluntary basis. The sky didn’t fall in and businesses still carried on after Labor introduced transparency laws for large firms’ Australian operations.”

Appleby, the firm at the centre of the Paradise Papers, has described the leak as a “a serious criminal act”.

“This was an illegal computer hack,” it said in a statement on its website.

“Our systems were accessed by an intruder who deployed the tactics of a professional hacker and covered his/her tracks to the extent that a forensic investigation by a leading international Cyber & Threats team concluded that there was no definitive evidence that any data had left our systems.”

The Süddeutsche Zeitung, the German newspaper which first obtained the documents, said it was unable to verify the claim of hacking.

“The paper received the data through legal channels and evaluated them journalistically. The newspaper declines to take part in speculation as to how the data may have been obtained,” it said.

You may have seen our story on the links to Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau in the Paradise Papers. His chief fundraiser was involved in the in the movement of millions of dollars to offshore havens.

The Guardian’s Canadian correspondent, Ashifa Kassam, said the reaction so far has been limited. She’s just sent me an update:

The Canadian tax authorities said they are reviewing the reports.

The Canada Revenue Agency “is reviewing links to Canadian entities and will take appropriate action in regards to the Paradise Papers,’’, according to John Power, a spokesperson for the ministry that oversees the agency.

Andrew Scheer, leader of the opposition Conservative party, also addressed the reports on social media.

“Justin Trudeau’s well-connected Liberal friends get away with paying less, and you pay more,” Scheer wrote on Facebook. “There is nothing fair about that.”

Justin Trudeau
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks at a Liberal Party fund raising event. Photo by Arindam Banerjee. Photograph: Banerjee/REX/Shutterstock

Updated

In America, there are growing calls on Congress to launch an immediate investigation of the extent of multinational tax avoidance.

Americans for Tax Fairness, a not-for-profit, described the Paradise Papers as a “window into the financial secrets of the world’s biggest corporations and wealthiest individuals”.

The group’s executive director Frank Clemente said planned tax cuts for “yacht-owning island-hoppers” ought to be scrapped.

“We must not give one penny in tax cuts to millionaires and corporations,” Clemente said.

“We call for an immediate halt to consideration of the current GOP tax bill, which rewards tax dodging and encourages companies to send more of their operations offshore.”

What do the Paradise Papers tell us? How is the world reacting?

Let’s recap on the developments so far. The Guardian, along with almost 100 media partners, have today revealed the Paradise Papers, a vast cache of 13.4m documents, one of the largest leaks ever seen. The majority of the files come from Appleby, an offshore law firm specialising in the world’s tax havens. The documents expose the secrets and financial affairs of some of the world’s most powerful and wealthy.

The most significant revelations made so far include:

The revelations have prompted immediate reaction from politicians and activists across the globe.

  • A range of groups have called for multinational companies to disclose their tax affairs on a country-by-country basis. This would force transparency and help prevent the shifting of profits to low-tax jurisdictions
  • The former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan said transparency was the only way to stop large companies looting African nations.
  • The Tax Justice Network called for the United Nations to convene a summit of world leaders to find a way to end tax abuse and financial secrecy.
  • Transparency International wants greater transparency on the beneficial ownership of corporations, to prevent them using use complex and hidden structures to mask their true owners. It also wants measures to compel law firms and other intermediaries to report suspicions of money laundering.
  • Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the Paradise Papers are further evidence that there’s “one rule for the super-rich and another for the rest of us”. The Labour party’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, said he’d be writing to the Premier League about the complex offshore webs used by two Russian billionaires to buy stakes in Arsenal and Everton football clubs.
  • The Australian Taxation Office said it was confident it was in a position to “respond decisively to this data release”.
  • Appleby, the firm at the centre of the leak, says the allegations raised by media agencies are unfounded and display a lack of understanding about the legitimate uses of offshore structures.

Updated

Do you pay more income tax than mining giant Glencore or oil and gas corporate ExxonMobil Australia? Guardian Australia’s data editor, Nick Evershed, put together this handy and slightly disturbing comparison tool late last year. Plug in your income (in Australian dollars) and we’ll show you all the large Australian companies who pay less tax than you. It’s certainly worth revisiting in the wake of the Paradise Papers.

The former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan has spoken of the power of transparency in ensuring multinationals pay their fair share of tax. In an interview with German newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Annan said transparency was the only way to stop large companies looting African nations.

He called for deals between African governments and companies to be released, to detail how much a company has earned and what they have paid in tax.

“Some would tell you there’s nothing wrong with tax havens and shell companies – and that, sometimes, there are legitimate reasons for using them,” Annan said.

“But we cannot forget that these instruments can also be used by criminal elements or what I call uncivil society, to do incredible things. It would be wonderful if we had an international regime that revealed who is behind these shell companies and who the beneficiary owner is.”

Annan authored the 2013 Africa Progress Report, which found the Democratic Republic of Congo lost $1.36bn between 2010 and 2012 after mining rights were sold cheaply to firms based on the British Virgin Islands. The report found that:

“Concessions have been sold on terms that appear to generate large profits for foreign investors, most of them registered in offshore centres, with commensurate losses for public finance.”

Updated

It’s easy to lose sight of the human consequences of tax avoidance. The point has been made this morning by Oxfam and Transparency International that denying tax revenue to government takes away crucial funding for essential services, like hospitals or schools.

But just how much revenue are governments across the globe losing to tax avoidance?

The latest estimate from the Tax Justice Network suggests profit shifting has exploded in the past decade.

The network says governments are losing $500bn a year in taxes due to avoidance by big multinationals. That represents over 20% of corporate tax revenues. Researchers at the International Monetary Fund found tax haven “spillovers” were causing tax losses of $400bn for OECD members per year, and $200bn for lower-income countries.

You can read more about these estimates here.

The vast majority of the Paradise Papers are concerned with the complex dealings of huge multinationals.

But the leak also reveals the interactions of actors, rock stars, and sports teams in the world’s tax secrecy jurisdictions. The list includes:

  • The U2 frontman Bono, whose real name is Paul Hewson. Bono used a Maltese company to buy a share in a small-town Lithuanian shopping centre. Bono was an investor in the Maltese company Nude Estates, which bought the Aušra mall – named after the Lithuanian word for dawn – for €5.8m (£5.1m) shortly after it opened in 2007. The shopping centre was later transferred to a Guernsey company, called Nude Estates 1. Both Malta and Guernsey are considered low-tax jurisdictions.
  • INXS singer Michael Hutchence. There has long been mystery over Hutchence’s estate and the inheritance of his supposed fortune. The Paradise Papers shed fresh light on who owns the rights to Hutchence’s body of work, which includes several unpublished songs. His business manager, Colin Diamond, tried to set up a company in the tax haven of Mauritius in 2015 to exploit “sound recordings, images, films, and related material embodying the performance of Michael Hutchence”.
  • Premier league clubs Everton and Arsenal. The leak shows the close links between Uzbek-Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, who part owns Arsenal, and Monaco-resident Farhad Moshiri, who owns a stake in Everton. Both men used Appleby to help purchase stakes in the clubs. The files illuminate the close relationship between the pair, and have prompted concerns that the premier league rules prohibiting “dual ownership” may not be broad enough.

Chris Clarke, the Guardian’s deputy creative director, has given us a glimpse of how the paper’s stunning Paradise Papers front page was pieced together.

The Tax Justice Network, a not-for-profit, has called for the United Nations to convene a summit of world leaders to find a way to end tax abuse and financial secrecy.

The chief executive officer, Alex Cobham, said it was not enough to simply respond to individual companies or jurisdictions doing the wrong thing.

Instead, world leaders needed to address the fundamental and systemic aspects of global finance, which were allowing tax to be avoided with impunity.

Cobham said world leaders needed to “agree a path to ending financial secrecy and tax abuse for good”.

Binding targets to reduce illicit financial flows ought to be developed, he said, alongside accountability measures to ensure progress was made. Multinationals should be forced to report their tax affairs country by country, to ensure profits were not being shifted to low-tax jurisdictions.

“These leaks confirm the systemic nature of tax abuse and corrupt practices, with global financial secrecy being marketed by major law firms, banks and accounting firms,” Cobham said.

“Government efforts to combat this problem have been piecemeal at best. And that is why the Tax Justice Network is today calling for a genuinely global response.”

Updated

Transparency International, which campaigns against tax secrecy, described the list of people and corporations caught up in the Paradise Papers as “shocking”.

The organisation’s chair, Delia Ferreira Rubio, has called for greater transparency on the beneficial ownership of corporations, which can use complex and hidden subsidiaries to mask their true owners. Rubio also wants measures to compel law firms and other intermediaries to report suspicions of money laundering.

“Clearly financial oversight authorities and lawmakers must realise the system is broken,” Rubio said.

“Complex, cross-border structures are being used to facilitate a wide range of secret activity, which could include corruption, fraud and abusive tax schemes.”

Updated

The Bermudan government has issued a statement about the Paradise Papers. It has described the leak as the result of a “multi-site cyber-attack”.

Appleby, which had 6.8m of its records leaked, is headquartered and was founded in Bermuda.

The premier of Bermuda David Burt has issued the following statement:

“We maintain high vigilance on any and all criminal activities, including cyber, as well as requiring leading standards on tax and transparency of all who do business here.

“We will not tolerate non-compliance in any of these areas, and are reviewing this incident and related matters, and will take any further action as required.”

Updated

Here’s the Guardian’s front page on the Paradise Papers. It leads with revelations that the Queen held millions in an undisclosed Cayman Islands fund. Part of the investment funded BrightHouse, a retailer accused of exploiting some of the UK’s most vulnerable.

Staying with Australia for a moment. The Australian taxation office has revealed it has taken action against 19 companies for using cross-currency interest rate swaps, a complex mechanism revealed in the Paradise Papers, which allows corporations to shift profits to low tax jurisdictions.

The ATO said it has anticipated the publication of the Paradise Papers for several months. Appleby, the firm at the heart of the leak, attempted to pre-empt the Paradise Papers last month by issuing a statement of its own, declaring it had done nothing wrong but that its data had been compromised. But the statement appears to have spurred early investigations from the ATO. Following Appleby’s statement, the ATO began working with its partners in the Joint International Taskforce on Shared Intelligence and Collaboration to investigate “possible Australian links”.

The ATO deputy commissioner, Mark Konza, said he was confident “the ATO is in a position to respond decisively to this data release”.

“We anticipate further data may be published by the ICIJ and the ATO will continue to work closely with other tax administrations to share intelligence on advisers operating globally,” Konza said.

“Domestically, we are working with the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, the Australian federal police and AUSTRAC to further cross-check data and build our intelligence base, undertake audits, apply significant tax penalties where appropriate and refer cases to the Serious Financial Crime Taskforce for criminal investigation,” he said.

Updated

Australia's politicians react to the Paradise Papers

In Australia the resources minister, Matthew Canavan, has been quizzed about revelations that Glencore, a Swiss-based mining giant, used cross-currency swaps of up to $25bn of a type under specific investigation by the Australian tax office.

Canavan wouldn’t comment on the detail of Glencore’s affairs.

But he said the Australian government was committed to stamping out tax avoidance more generally.

“You might have seen ... that recently the Australian tax office did take a very large case involving Chevron, which it was successful with, but that is still subject to appeal,” Canavan told the Australian broadcasting corporation.

“The Australian government is taking these issues very seriously, it is absolutely the case that companies operating here, making profits here, must pay tax here,” he said.

My colleague in Australia, Gareth Hutchens, has been listening to the reaction of treasurer Scott Morrison to the Paradise Papers. Morrison said the Australian tax office has been on the job and proactive in stopping multinational tax avoidance.

He dismissed the Labor opposition’s calls for comprehensive country-by-country tax data to be publicly released, saying companies would refuse to share their information with tax officials if they knew the information would be released publicly.

“If you were to go down Labor’s path the information would turn off. It would just turn off,” he said.

“I think it shows extreme naivety on behalf of the Labor party in not understanding how the base erosion and profit-shifting processes work.

“I’m not going to do anything that’s going to undermine a key information tool that is actually helping tax jurisdictions ... to put an end to these sort of tax-shifting arrangements,” he said.

New laws on multinational corporate tax avoidance were introduced in Australia in 2015 by the Coalition. The tax office has recently netted an additional $4bn in tax revenue from multinationals, but Labor’s shadow assistant treasurer, Andrew Leigh, has previously said that has little to do with the new laws.

Leigh issued a statement following the Paradise Papers publication, calling on prime minister Malcolm Turnbull to commit to greater tax transparency in Australia.

“Until the government commits to a comprehensive tax haven transparency package – as Labor has – the public is going to rely on Paradise Papers-style leaks to expose the murky use of tax havens,” Leigh said.

The opposition leader Bill Shorten hit out at the government’s plans to give tax cuts to corporates.

Updated

Corbyn says Paradise Papers more proof of inequality

The political reaction is coming thick and fast in the UK.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the Paradise Papers are further evidence that there’s “one rule for the super-rich and another for the rest of us”.

The Labour party’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, said he’ll be writing to the premier league about the complex offshore webs used by two Russian billionaires to buy stakes in Arsenal and Everton football clubs.

The Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable said tax should not be an “optional extra for the global elite”. Cable said the former prime minister, David Cameron, had failed to clamp down on tax avoidance.

“Citizens who dutifully pay their taxes need confidence that the system is fair,” Cable said.

“But the Paradise Papers suggest that a small number of wealthy individuals have been able, entirely legally, to put their money beyond the reach of the Exchequer.”

Updated

The Paradise Papers are the product of a staggering amount of work.

The investigation of the leaked documents involved more than 380 journalists from almost 100 media organisations in 67 countries, working through 13.4m documents covering a period of nearly 70 years, from 1950 to 2016.

Those journalists worked with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which has now published six investigations of the offshore world since April 2013, including Secrecy for Sale, ChinaLeaks, LuxLeaks, SwissLeaks and, in 2016, the Panama Papers.

The ICIJ director Gerard Ryle said previous investigations caused the fall of leaders in Pakistan and Iceland, multiple arrests, and the recovery of hundreds of millions dollars in taxes for schools and hospitals.

“Our expertise, our global network and our access to data sets that exist nowhere else make us uniquely qualified to find information that is hidden from the public,” Ryle said.

“To borrow a famous phrase from the Watergate scandal, we are able to follow the money in ways that others are not,” he said.

Updated

Republic, an activist group in the UK, have called for the Queen to “come clean” over her financial affairs. The Paradise Papers showed how the Queen’s private estate invested millions of pounds in a Cayman Islands fund. Some of the funds went to BrightHouse, a retailer accused of exploitation. Graham Smith, Republic’s CEO, said the Queen ought to have ensured her money was invested ethically.

“The Queen now needs to come clean, to set the highest standards of transparency and probity in her financial affairs,” Smith said.

“We need to know where the Queen is making her money and what taxes she is paying. We also need to know if there has been any lobbying of the government regarding tax haven reform,” he said.

Appleby responds to vast leak of its data

Appleby, the firm at the centre of the leak, says it has found no evidence of wrongdoing either by itself or its clients. It says the allegations raised by media agencies are unfounded and display a lack of understanding about the legitimate uses of offshore structures.

Here is Appleby’s statement on the Paradise Papers:

Appleby has recently received inquiries from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and a number of media organisations who are partners of the ICIJ.

These inquiries have arisen from documents that journalists claim to have seen and involve allegations made against our business and the business conducted by some of our clients.

We take any allegation of wrongdoing, implicit or otherwise, extremely seriously. Appleby operates in highly regulated jurisdictions and like all professional organisations in our regions, we are subject to frequent regulatory checks and we are committed to achieving the high standards set by our regulators. We are also committed to the highest standards of client service and confidentiality. It is what we stand for. This commitment is unequivocal.

Appleby has thoroughly and vigorously investigated the allegations and we are satisfied that there is no evidence of any wrongdoing, either on the part of ourselves or our clients.

We refute any allegations that may suggest otherwise and we would be happy to cooperate fully with any legitimate and authorised investigation of the allegations by the appropriate and relevant authorities.

We are an offshore law firm that advises clients on legitimate and lawful ways to conduct their business. We do not tolerate illegal behaviour. It is true that we are not infallible. Where we find that mistakes have happened, we act quickly to put things right and we make the necessary notifications to the relevant authorities.

Having researched the ICIJ’s allegations, we believe they are unfounded and based on a lack of understanding of the legitimate and lawful structures used in the offshore sector.

• Appleby’s statement has been edited for length and clarity

Governments around the world have come under immediate pressure to clamp down on multinational tax avoidance.

Activists have renewed calls for stronger mandatory reporting rules to force multinationals to publicly disclose their tax affairs country by country. Such a measure would help shine a light on attempts to shift profits from high-tax to low-tax jurisdictions. Oxfam GB’s head of inequality, Ana Caistor Arendar, said the Paradise Papers showed why such a measure was necessary.

“This is yet another stark reminder that, when it comes to tax, too many big companies and wealthy individuals play by different rules to the rest of us,” Arendar said.

“There’s an often overlooked but very real human cost to tax dodging – it deprives poor countries of billions each year needed for life-saving healthcare and life-changing education.

“The government should not hesitate to make big companies based in Britain report their tax payments in every country, and our overseas territories and crown dependencies reveal the real owners of companies.”

In the United States, Oxfam America’s policy director, Gawain Kripke, said the Paradise Papers served as a warning against the tax laws proposed by House and Republican leaders last week.

“Congress must immediately halt action on the proposed tax bill and launch a comprehensive investigation into the activities revealed by these leaks,” Kripke said.

“The House Ways and Means committee should postpone its planned mark-up of the bill until there is a complete accounting of how the proposed changes to US tax laws would exacerbate the tax dodging revealed by Paradise Papers.”

Updated

Let’s talk a bit more about the Paradise Papers. What are they? Where have they come from? And how does the leak compare with other, similar revelations about offshore tax havens in recent years?

The scale of the leak is mind-boggling. There are 13.4m documents, making up 1.4TB of data. It is one of the biggest leaks in history. The number of documents is the most ever leaked. The Paradise Papers is the second-biggest leak in terms of data, behind only the 2.6TB Panama Papers leak from offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca, in 2016.

About 6.8m of the Paradise Papers files come from the law firm Appleby, a respected offshore law firm founded in Bermuda. Appleby operates in tax havens across the world. Documents have also been leaked from Asiaciti, and 19 corporate registries maintained by governments in secrecy jurisdictions – Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, the Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the Cook Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Labuan, Lebanon, Malta, the Marshall Islands, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent, Samoa, Trinidad and Tobago, and Vanuatu.

You can read more about the Paradise Papers in this explainer from Nick Hopkins:

Updated

What we've learned

The Paradise Papers contain explosive revelations about the wealthiest and most powerful individuals across the globe. Among the top stories published this morning include:

Updated

The Paradise Papers expose how big business, leading politicians, and sport and rock stars shelter their wealth in secretive tax havens. The details come from a leak of 13.4m files from two offshore service providers and the company registries of 19 tax havens.

They were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with partners including the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times.

Here we’ll be monitoring reaction in the US, UK, Australia and around the world from politicians, commentators – and tax enforcers.

Updated

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