Over the next three weeks, ICIJ will bring you three articles on ways to search our Offshore Leaks Database that now includes more than 680,000 entities from 55 secrecy jurisdictions.
For the past several years, ICIJ has updated the Offshore Leaks Database with data from different leaks of information on offshore companies, as well as corporate registries from several secrecy jurisdictions, most recently in the Caribbean. The full dataset is searchable and available for download.
One way to explore the more than 680,000 entities is to use the jurisdictions and countries associated to these companies and their officers.
1. Find out who is connected to your country
One place to start is by searching for directors and shareholders of offshore companies who are connected to your country.
To do that, simply select a country in the right-hand menu and hit “Search.” (Circled in the image here.)
There result page will list all entities, addresses and officers connected to this specific country. You can then explore each of those by clicking on highlighted results, which will take you to a visualization detailing the connection between an entity, its address and its shareholders or directors.
2. Focus on a specific tax haven
Another option is to focus on a specific jurisdiction. Let’s say you are doing research on Malta, a tiny island the EU that was used by the Colombian singer-songwriter Shakira to transfer more than $30 million of music rights, according to Spanish paper El Confidencial.
First, select “Search by jurisdiction”.
Then select “Malta” from the dropdown box on the right (the jurisdictions are ordered alphabetically), you will see listed the 52 entities in our data that were incorporated on the island.
3. Research addresses you found in other documents
Finally, contrary to a lot of corporate registries, the Offshore Leaks Database is searchable by addresses. This means that you could search for an interesting address you have found in your research and find out who used it to register an offshore company.
Type the address in the search bar and hit search.
Then, select the “Addresses” tab in the search results.
Happy searching! As always, don’t forget to tell us what you find in the data.
And don’t forget, ICIJ believes this data should be publicly-available, and we need your support to keep it that way.
Make a donation and help us keep it free, online and accessible.