Paradise Papers

Paradise Papers, popular name for some 13.4 million confidential electronic files relating to investments with offshore companies, most of them with the law firm and corporate services provider Appleby, founded in Bermuda, with two additional offshore services firms, Estera, formerly part of Appleby, and the Singapore-based Asiaciti Trust, and 19 government corporate registries in tax havens mainly in the Caribbean and Pacific. Unlike the Panama Papers, the files, which cover the period from 1950 to 2016, revealed primarily legal tax-avoidance arrangements made in jurisdictions that offer legal and financial secrecy. The investments revealed were made by a wide range of wealthy individuals including politicians and entertainment and sports celebrities, as well as prominent multinational corporations, and include individuals and corporations from Angola, Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, India, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, and other nations. The documents were released to or obtained by an anomymous source or sources and then leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung in much the same way as the Panama Papers were revealed. The information was subsequently made available to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, consisting of 96 media partners; more than 350 journalists from more than 60 countries participated in analyzing the data.

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