Australia’s prime minister and a former leader of Mongolia are new additions to ICIJ’s interactive gallery of politicians from the Panama Papers.
One year after ICIJ and more than 100 media partners published the first investigations in the Panama Papers project, ICIJ has updated its roll call of dozens of public officials, friends and relatives whose offshore connections were revealed – many for the first time – through analysis of the 11.5 million files from the law firm Mossack Fonseca.
ICIJ’s partners in Australia, the Australian Financial Review, and in Mongolia, Mongol TV, first revealed their leaders’ offshore connections in the days and weeks following the initial publication of the global project.
Australia’s prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was the director of an offshore company with interests in a planned gold mine in Siberia. Mongolia’s former prime minister, Sükhbaataryn Batbold, held shares in an offshore company that owned a Mongolian company that developed a mine. Turnbull and Batbold said their offshore connections were transparent and respected applicable business and disclosure laws.
ICIJ’s Power Players interactive, which is available in five languages, now includes 14 current and former world leaders and more than 50 other ministers, judges, army chiefs and other public officials and their family members or close friends who used or were connected to offshore companies created by Mossack Fonseca.
Millions of people from nearly every country have visited the Power Players interactive.
Events around the world have marked the first anniversary of the Panama Papers publication, including protests in Mongolia and high-level parliamentary debates in the European Union.
Panama’s attorney-general met with representatives of 15 European nations this week to discuss Panama Papers and ongoing criminal investigations. The attorney-general agreed to share documents obtained from Mossack Fonseca during police raids in Panama that took place after the publication of ICIJ and its media partners, according to reports.
Elsewhere, French newspaper Le Monde reported that 26 companies and individuals named within the Panama Papers are under intensive investigation by an elite anti-fraud unit. In Ecuador, the tax office announced it had recovered $66 million in unpaid taxes and fines, according to El Universo.
In the United States, senior members of Congress introduced bills to target offshore abuses. Representative Lloyd Doggett said in a press release that the bills would “crack down on some of the illegal tax evasion exposed by the “Panama Papers,” one year ago this week.”
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