The day before publication, a blog in Malta connected the dots. Its author had seen a promo on a website for one of the partners, Finnish public television, discussing the upcoming Panama leaks. Walker and Ryle had granted a small number of the television partners permission to run promotional spots for their shows that could mention the collaboration, Panama, and the leak, but not the name Mossack Fonseca. In some cases, the TV shows were required to advertise their programs by law. The Malta blog then obtained the Mossack Fonseca client letter. Putting the two together, it ran a post with the headline, “Mossack Fonseca lets cat out of bag ahead of worldwide coverage of massive Panama Leaks data.” Normally, this would be a minor inconvenience. Only in this case, the blogger was Daphne Caruana Galizia, the mother of ICIJ’s data wrangler Matthew Caruana Galizia. As some partners grumbled, Matthew swore he had not told his mom about the project.
In Iceland, beyond the members of Jóhannes Kristjánsson’s production company, Reykjavik Media, and his partner on the documentary, the daily news program Kastijós, few knew what was coming at the state television station where his report was to be broadcast. They had told the CEO of the station only the day before. The time slot—Sunday at six p.m.—was reserved for a children’s program, one of the oldest on Icelandic television. Since everyone would publish across the world at the same time, the station preempted the program for a special report.
Kristjánsson insisted on being in the control room for the broadcast, a tradition he observed for all his broadcasts. As he sat in the booth, his eyes were bloodshot, his face blotchy from nervous exhaustion. He felt the weight of responsibility, not only to his Icelandic colleagues but to all the partners in ICIJ with whom he had worked so hard for the past nine months.
In Munich, Süddeutsche Zeitung had created a special microwebsite specifically for the project. It managed to jump the embargo by fifteen minutes to publish early. A few minutes later, at 1:49 p.m. EDT, Edward Snowden somehow found this microsite and linked to it on Twitter. Snowden’s tweet to his millions of followers declared, “Biggest leak in the history of data journalism just went live, and it’s about corruption.” In London, the staff of the Guardian howled. Intentionally or not, the Germans had their revenge for Offshore Leaks. The Guardian hit publish on its stories. More than eighty media partners followed.
Kristjánsson watched the shocked expressions in the broadcasting room from the people who had not known the content of the program. More than 60 percent of the population of Iceland witnessed their panicked prime minister respond to the revelation of a secret offshore company by abruptly ending his interview and fleeing. Twitter and Facebook exploded. In the first twenty-four hours, ICIJ’s website received more than six million page views.
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JÜRGEN MOSSACK BEGAN to receive texts and emails from friends, family, and clients. As the messages and the stories piled on, one after the other, he felt bewildered. Mossfon was being connected to so many issues and notorious people. The remove he and Ramón Fonseca had long felt as their due was evaporating before their eyes. The partners quickly set up a damage control committee. They had already filed a criminal complaint in Panama about the suspected hacking. Now they hired an American consulting firm to help them respond to the media. But it wasn’t until Mossack turned on the television and saw his life’s work on every news channel that he realized the dimensions of what had just occurred. Fonseca grew ill and largely took to his house for a week. Two days after the first stories dropped, he formally resigned from his position with the Panamanian government. Mossack, who was due to become the president of the Rotary Club, withdrew his name from consideration.
At La Prensa, they had waited almost an hour after the other partners had published to put their own stories online. They wanted to report on the fact of the global investigation rather than breaking the story themselves and thereby risking legal jeopardy. In Panama, it is a crime to publish confidential emails or material derived from a theft. At the last minute, the paper’s lawyers insisted the articles be written in the conditional tense to insulate La Prensa further. They also opted not to put the names of the authors on the stories. Nonetheless, the reaction was exactly as Vásquez had feared. Some of her friends dropped away or questioned her motives on Facebook. The defenders of the industry styled the “Panama Papers” as an attack against the entire country. La Prensa’s reporters were denounced in rival newspapers and threatened on Twitter.
Ramsés Owens had left Mossfon in 2011, after it became clear that Mossack and Fonseca would never promote him to partner. He was on a business trip to El Salvador when the stories broke. As his cell phone lit up, he hurried home. Several months earlier, Owens had been interviewed in his Panama office by Süddeutsche Zeitung reporter Frederik Obermaier, who had come to the country on a stealth reporting trip. Owens thought he was simply giving background on the industry. At the outset of the interview, Obermaier asked if a cameraman could tape the encounter. Always eager to please, Owens agreed. Now, back in his office, post-publication, Owens found Obermaier’s business card. On it he scrawled in Spanish, “Avoid this person. He is the devil.”
The day after Kristjánsson’s report shook Iceland, Ólafur Hauksson, the special prosecutor investigating the banking crisis, was in his office when he noticed the cars. Reykjavík is not a bustling metropolis. Yet Hauksson watched as a line of vehicles as far as the eye could see made their way into the city. The call had gone out on Facebook. It was the last day of the Althingi, the Icelandic parliament, and organizers had urged Icelanders to congregate in the square in front of the parliament building. For Icelanders, who were still traumatized from the financial crisis, the Mossfon revelations felt as if a wound barely healed had been ripped open.
The story spread far beyond Iceland. Video of Gunnlaugsson’s interview was featured on the New York Times website and in media around the world. Kristjánsson was inundated by interview requests. He took the big ones. Sven Bergman asked him to meet a cameraman in the square for a follow-up interview with Swedish television. Bergman wanted the crowd as a backdrop. Unable to find a parking place nearby, Kristjánsson and his wife, Brynja, made their way to the rendezvous spot on foot. The square was swollen with almost ten thousand people—the largest protest in the country’s history. Icelanders in the crowd repeatedly waylaid the couple to congratulate Kristjánsson. For a man accustomed to directing the attention rather than receiving it, the praise made him deeply uncomfortable.
Two days later the prime minister resigned.
The following week, Kristjánsson and his family were watching the news on TV at home. His eleven-year-old daughter asked her mother why Iceland was having another election. Brynja replied, “Well, it is partly because of your dad.” At that moment, the enormity of what had occurred registered for Kristjánsson for the first time.
Gunnlaugsson was not the only official to step down over the Panama Papers. In Uruguay, Juan Pedro Damiani, whose law firm had done extensive work with Mossfon over the years, resigned from FIFA’s ethics committee when it emerged that his firm had set up companies for a man under indictment in the United States for soccer corruption. FIFA’s new president, the files revealed, had also been involved with some of the nefarious characters connected to the sport, although there was no evidence that he had acted illegally. Nonetheless, the Swiss federal police conducted raids on the Union of European Football Associations to collect evidence concerning the revelations. Meanwhile, the prosecutor in Geneva seized the Nahmads’ Modigliani painting Seated Man with a Cane, stored in the Freeport while the prosecutor’s office conducted their own investigation. Swiss authorities eventually gave the painting back.
Around the world government officials struggled to explain their connections to offshore companies revealed by the Mossfon files. Few did as poor a job at it as British prime minister David Cameron. Downing Street tried five separate stabs over the course of several days to answer the simple question of whether Cameron benefited from his father’s offsh
ore company, Panama-based Blairmore Holdings, which appeared to have been designed to avoid UK taxes. A spokesperson began with calling it “a private matter,” which did not stand long. In the face of sustained press scrutiny, this answer was upgraded to “the prime minister doesn’t own any shares.” The next day this explanation turned into a statement that he and his family would not benefit in the future from the fund. After three days of prevarications, Cameron himself finally admitted that he had profited from his father’s offshore business.
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IN VENEZUELA, THE Communication Ministry sent a lengthy communiqué to the country’s media advising them not to publish stories about the Panama Papers. “It should be noted that these documents are being used selectively for certain policy areas on an international scale,” the memo warned, hinting darkly, as the Kremlin had, that the release came from the CIA.
The note sketched out an oddly self-incriminating conspiracy theory. The first round of stories might be a decoy, the ministry postulated. Once the Panama Papers received validation from the world’s media, “new information will be published on senior officials of the National Government to justify the current attempt to increase interference and sanctions from the Obama administration, leaving us without room to maneuver before public opinion.”
Chillingly, the memo also singled out by name Venezuelan reporters working for independent media organizations that had participated in the project.
Throughout the world, the publication of the Mossfon data fed into attacks on journalists and preexisting political and social dramas in various countries. Reporters and editors wrestled with what part of the data was in the public interest. In Europe and the United States, the dominant concern was taxes, and people evading them. In Latin America and Africa, tax was a vital issue, but it took second place to concerns about corruption and political repression.
In Argentina, a dozen years under the Kirchners had left behind a deeply polarized country. Much of the media, particularly television, was partisan and fiercely critical of anyone who disagreed with their position—for American audiences, imagine Fox versus MSNBC, times ten. The Panama Papers revelations served to deepen the country’s cynicism, turning what should have been a journalistic triumph into a bitter experience for the journalists involved.
The Argentineans had not found Kirchner’s money in the Mossfon data. This immediately raised suspicions from the anti-Kirchner side. Instead, on December 8, 2016, after a new round of material was uploaded into Blacklight, the journalists had stumbled upon the newly elected president, Mauricio Macri, who had defeated Kirchner’s chosen successor and was to assume office two days hence. The scion of a wealthy industrialist, Macri was listed as a decadelong director of Fleg Trading, a company legally created by his father, which became inactive in 2009. Macri would later claim that he did not declare his participation in the company in government disclosure documents because it had failed to earn a profit. Kirchner supporters falsely accused reporters of deliberately withholding the information to favor Macri in the election. Others argued disingenuously that Macri’s company simply proved that all politicians were equally dirty.
“The Kirchneristas accused us of trying to save Macri and the Macri people of trying to drown him,” says Argentinean reporter Mariel Fitz Patrick.
Among Macri’s supporters was the brother of ICIJ’s Marina Walker. The mere fact that the project had dragged the Macri revelations into the light led to some angry family phone calls. ICIJ member Hugo Alconada, the investigations editor at La Nación, a newspaper that had been fiercely anti-Kirchner, saw the discovery as an opportunity to demonstrate the paper’s independence and bolster its image in the eyes of readers. But this idea ran into trouble when the reporting team discovered that La Nación itself was in the data.
Alconada decided to publish a list of prominent Argentinean businessmen found in the files, in which he planned to include his own newspaper and an owner from a rival newspaper chain. His bosses nixed the idea, arguing that since the reporters had not proved the companies were up to anything illegal, it was inappropriate to publish the information. Alconada pointed out that ICIJ or its other partners would surely reveal the names anyway. The newspaper would lose even more credibility if it came out in another Argentinean publication first. He then threatened to quit if the paper suppressed the material. After Alconada’s fellow editors added their names to the protest, the publisher relented, allowing the publication of the businessmen’s names but running a separate note to readers on its own involvement.
In Ecuador, President Rafael Correa denounced the project participants on Twitter and rallied a troll army to send them a message. He helpfully included the reporters’ social media accounts, which were then deluged with nasty comments. A dozen or so government supporters demonstrated outside El Comercio and El Universo, the two newspapers involved in the project.
As Panama’s La Prensa had done, the Ecuadorian newspapers ran their stories without bylines and after everyone else had published. The findings, sourced to ICIJ, revealed that the country’s attorney general, the president’s cousin (who was a former governor of the central bank), and the secretary of intelligence (who was a Mossfon intermediary) were in the data. The family that owned El Universo also had a Mossfon company. The owner himself had alerted Mónica Almeida, the Quito bureau chief leading the investigation for the newspaper, about the company. It had been created after President Correa had won a civil judgment against the paper that threatened to shut it down.
As part of his efforts to rein in the media, Correa had spearheaded the creation of the Orwellian-named Citizen Participation and Social Control Council a few years earlier. The council sent a letter to the newspapers demanding that the reporters appear before it on Monday, April 18, to hand over the Mossfon data and respond to questions. The reporters sent a letter the Friday before the meeting declining to appear and explaining that they did not have the data, ICIJ did. A showdown appeared imminent. But on the intervening Saturday, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake devastated the country. As the focus of the media and the government turned to the victims and the damage, the Monday meeting was quietly forgotten.
One of Correa’s complaints about the Panama Papers was that the journalists had not posted all the data online. He suggested that important details were being hidden and he promised to acquire the entire set and make it public. ICIJ had never seriously considered releasing all the data. Many, if not most, of the people found in the database had committed no crime. There was little public-interest rationale for publishing personal information such as passports, bank account information, and emails filled with intimate details.
This explanation was insufficient for WikiLeaks, whose founder, Julian Assange, was holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London. The organization pounded ICIJ for not releasing the data. “If you censor more than 99% of the documents you are engaged in 1% journalism by definition,” the group nonsensically tweeted. Matters took a more serious turn, when a television project partner mistakenly aired a Blacklight URL. Several quick-witted techies put the URL online and invited people to try to hack the site. Out of an abundance of caution, Mar Cabra had the site temporarily taken down and the URL changed, much to the dismay of journalists still working on stories who did not want to lose a minute with the data.
In Hong Kong, the indomitable Yuen-Ying Chan had lined up multiple partners for the project, meeting them separately in isolated spots around the University of Hong Kong before bringing them all together. In the individual meetings, she told them about the project and solicited commitments to collaborate. The collaborators included Ming Pao, CommonWealth Magazine, and the South China Morning Post. Once again the mainland Chinese government blocked the information.
The day after Ming Pao devoted its entire front page to its Panama Papers findings, the executive chief editor, Keung Kwok-Yuen, was fired. The paper’s owners cited cost cutting to explain the decision, but the staff was unconvinced. Hundreds of reporters, editors,
and free-speech activists rallied outside the building in protest. It was dubbed the “ginger protest,” because many demonstrators held up pieces of the vegetable, the name of which in Cantonese sounds like the editor’s surname.
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TEN DAYS AFTER publication, Panamanian national police cordoned off the side street where Mossfon had its headquarters and searched the firm’s offices for twenty-seven hours straight. Ramón Fonseca claims there were drug-sniffing dogs involved, but Javier Caraballo, the prosecutor in charge of the operation, insists no dogs were present. As the search progressed, a multinational collection of reporters and tourists camped out on the lawn in front of the building to watch the spectacle.
Caraballo confiscated copies of Mossfon’s computer data and carried it back to a shabby set of offices in the public ministry building. It was a fool’s errand. The prosecutor and his staff did not have the equipment, the subject-matter expertise, or the technical ability to make sense of the files, which had taken hundreds of investigative reporters a year to parse. And the prosecutor’s job was also much more difficult. Unlike the reporters, Caraballo was looking for violations of Panamanian law that occurred within a strict statute of limitations.
Jürgen Mossack desperately wanted to respond to what he saw as misconceptions about his business, but he did not trust the journalists who were involved in the project. He sought out Bloomberg News and the Wall Street Journal, which he judged to be sober and reputable business news organizations. Despite interviews with these outlets, the partners could do little to counter the slow drip of new revelations from the files and the reactions of investigators and prosecutors throughout the world. In that first month alone, financial regulators, tax authorities, and prosecutors across the world from Mexico to Norway launched inquiries. Police in Peru and El Salvador raided their respective countries’ Mossfon offices. European authorities pledged new cooperation to hunt down tax evaders. Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, opened an investigation. Spain’s minister of industry resigned after reporters caught him lying about his offshore companies.
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