A little over a year ago, a poorly-sourced rumor started floating around about Vladimir Putin’s true net worth. It said that in his time in charge of Russia, he’d been funneling money away from the state, stashing it in offshore accounts, accumulating an absurd amount of wealth.
Two hundred billion dollars.
Well, yesterday, that uncorroborated story came true, in what people are calling one of the most massive data leaks in history, far surpassing the Wikileaks cables.
The Panama Papers consists of over 11 million documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, leaked to German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. The haul was so large that the paper enlisted the help of 100 other newspapers to process and report the data.
All of it covers how the law firm helped created shell corporations and fraudulent bank accounts for clients.
From Wired:
Just five years have passed since WikiLeaks’ Cablegate coup, and now the world is grappling with a whistleblower megaleak on a scale never seen before: 2.6 terabytes, well over a thousandfold larger.
On Sunday, more than a hundred media outlets around the world, coordinated by the Washington, DC-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, released stories on the Panama Papers, a gargantuan collection of leaked documents exposing a widespread system of global tax evasion. The leak includes more than 4.8 million emails, 3 million database files, and 2.1 million PDFs from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca that, according to analysis of the leaked documents, appears to specialize in creating shell companies that its clients have used to hide their assets.
The data contains names of some of the biggest world leaders, but predominant on that list is Vladimir Putin. From The BBC:
Also revealed is a suspected billion-dollar money-laundering ring that was run by a Russian bank and involved close associates of President Putin.
Money has been channelled through offshore companies, two of which were officially owned by one of the Russian president’s closest friends.
Concert cellist Sergei Roldugin has known Vladimir Putin since they were teenagers and is godfather to the president’s daughter Maria.
On paper, Mr Roldugin has personally made hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from suspicious deals. But documents from Mr Roldugin’s companies state that: “The company is a corporate screen established principally to protect the identity and confidentiality of the ultimate beneficial owner of the company.”
VLAD. You dog you. All told, the accounts for Putin total somewhere in the neighborhood of two billion dollars. So not as big as estimated, but you have to imagine the rumor from a year ago came from someone working on this project.
The law firm helped facilitate a great number of these illegal accounts, designed to shield owners from taxes. Here’s a typical example:
The documents also shed light on how Mossack Fonseca offered financial services designed to help business clients hide their wealth.
One wealthy client, US millionaire and life coach Marianna Olszewski, was offered fake ownership records to hide money from the authorities. This is in direct breach of international regulations designed to stop money-laundering and tax evasion.
An email from a Mossack executive to Ms Olszewski in January 2009 explains how she could deceive the bank: “We may use a natural person who will act as the beneficial owner… and therefore his name will be disclosed to the bank. Since this is a very sensitive matter, fees are quite high.”
Mossack has denied any wrongdoing.
In a statement, Mossack Fonseca said: “Your allegations that we provide structures supposedly designed to hide the identity of the real owners, are completely unsupported and false.
You can check out all the reporting on the Panama Papers here.