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Panama Papers To Reveal New Names Monday

By Kirsten Silven
Published on: 14:58 PST, May 8, 2016

The Panama Papers are poised to reveal the confidential details of more than 200,000 offshore accounts owned by some of the world’s richest citizens, reported CBC News. The latest release will reportedly happen at 2 p.m. ET Monday, May 9, and will include the names of at least 625 Canadians.

The Panama Papers will be released in the form of a searchable database that will include the name of anyone who is listed as a shareholder of an offshore company in the huge leak. Still, preliminary reports speculate that the ultimate owner of many offshore companies listed in the upcoming Panama Papers will remain shrouded in secrecy, mainly due to the identities of dozens of intermediary agencies that helped set up and run the offshore accounts in collaboration with Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm where the leaked records were sourced.

“Until now, only select names of high prominence have been made public since a group of global media outlets broke news of the Panama Papers last month.”

A journalist group will release a large portion of the documents included in the Panama Papers Monday, the AFP reported Sunday. The database will be accessible to the public at offshoreleaks.icij.org and will be released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), a U.S.-based group.

Unlike the infamous Wikileaks data dump that happened nearly a decade ago, the Panama Papers released Monday will be a searchable database that will reveal the names and information of around 200,000 offshore entities. Despite a “cease and desist” order issued by Mossack Fonseca last Thursday stating the release would violate attorney-client privilege, ICIJ has vowed to go through with releasing the Panama Papers.

“We think that information about who owns the company should be public and transparent,” stated Marina Walker Guevara, ICIJ deputy director, in a CNN interview.

The Panama Papers are comprised of around 2.6 terabytes of information and 11.5 million documents, according to Gerard Ryle, director of ICIJ, the Washington-based organization coordinating the records’ release.

“We think this is the next logical step in the investigation. We have 370 journalists around the world looking at the data, but it’s so vast. We know we’ve missed things.”

The ICIJ has always intended to publish the complete list of names and accounts listed in the Panama Papers, which were initially obtained by two German journalists who obtained the leaked data from an unnamed source earlier this year. The Panama Papers reportedly contain the financial secrets of heads of state, athletes, billionaires, and drug lords, marking the largest lead of records from an offshore tax haven in history. The Panama Papers contain letters that date back as far as 1977 and are sourced from the largely unknown but very elite law firm Mossack Fonseca, which has more than 500 staff members working in more than 40 countries and is one of the world’s most prolific creators of shell companies, which are a type of corporate structure that can be used to hide ownership of assets.

So far, most reports about the Panama Papers have focused on outing links to high profile individuals, such as politicians, celebs, and a few notorious and well-known criminals. Some of the names included are British Prime Minister David Cameron, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Argentine President Mauricio Macri, and film star Jackie Chan.

[Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images]

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