The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money

by Sylvie Beljanski, Frederik Obermaier

Overview

Late one evening, investigative journalist Bastian Obermayer receives an anonymous message offering him access to secret data. Through encrypted channels, he then receives documents revealing how the president of Argentina has sequestered millions of dollars of state money for private use. This is just the beginning.

Obermayer and fellow Süddeutsche journalist Frederik Obermaier find themselves immersed in the secret world where complex networks of letterbox companies help the super-rich to hide their money. Faced with the contents of the largest data leak in history, they activate an international network of journalists to follow every possible line of inquiry. Operating in the strictest secrecy for over a year, they uncover cases involving European prime ministers and international dictators, emirs and kings, celebrities and aristocrats. The real-life thriller behind the story of the century, The Panama Papers is an intense, unputdownable account that proves, once and for all, that there exists a small elite living by a different set of rules and blows their secret world wide open.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786071491
Publisher:	Oneworld Publications
Publication date:	03/30/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	253,706
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer are award-winning investigative journalists at the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s largest broadsheet. The first people to have access to the Panama papers, they were previously part of the international team of journalists who revealed the Offshore Leaks, Luxembourg Leaks and Swiss Leaks. Frederik and Bastian live in Munich.

Table of Contents

Foreword Luke Harding vii

Prologue 1

1 Start 10

2 Vladimir Putin's mysterious friend 18

3 The shadow of the past 26

4 Commerzbank and its lies 39

5 Mossack Fonseca's role in the Syrian war 50

6 From the Waffen-SS to the CIA and Panama 70

7 The football factory 87

8 On fishing, finding and fine art 95

9 A view of the White House 102

10 Sparks fly 111

11 Fear and trepidation 121

12 The Siemens millions 129

13 'Regarding my meeting with Harry Potter…' 141

14 A secret meeting with Alpine views 154

15 Mossfon Holdings 165

16 Spirit of Panama 176

17 The world is not enough 182

18 The looting machine 192

19 Secret meetings in the Komitèrom 209

20 At the mercy of monsters 217

21 The red nobility 223

22 The Gas Princess and the Chocolate King 233

23 Those German banks 244

24 A raid by the Vikings of finance 255

25 Dead-end trails 265

26 United by marriage, united by money 273

27 Star, star, Mega Star 286

28 The fourth man and FIFA 291

29 The 99 per cent and the future of tax havens 302

30 The cold heart of the offshore world 314

Epilogue 327

The revolution will be digitized: a statement John Doe 345

Acknowledgements 351

Glossary 355

Notes 359

Index 373

Editorial Reviews

08/15/2016
A reporter at Munich's Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper gets an anonymous text message that asks, "Interested in data?" So begins the saga of the Panama Papers, the largest leak of information to journalists in history. Obermayer encourages his contact, "John Doe," whose disclosures pull back the curtain on the dealings of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which, over several decades, helped set up hundreds of thousands of shell companies for a global array of famous—and infamous—clients. The resulting investigation into 11.5 million documents, assisted by the International Consortium for Investigative Journalists, topples multiple political figures, including Iceland's prime minister, and implicates public figures and major companies from around the world. Despite the challenge of summing up the work of over 320 reporters from over 70 countries, the coauthors, both Süddeutsche Zeitung reporters, present a straightforward account that involves German banks, soccer superstar Lionel Messi, African dictators, China's new elite, and Vladimir Putin's inner circle. This book is a fascinating first look at a scandal that may be the beginning of the end of the opaque and dodgy offshore finance industry. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"The biggest leak in the history of data journalism."
— Edward Snowden

"The authors expose a shockingly corrupt system ... A maddening, important indictment of the shadow economy that flourishes even as the legitimate economy suffers.”
— Kirkus Reviews

"THE PANAMA PAPERS is a tale of fearless and careful reporting by Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier … How to follow the money — the lesson of the Watergate investigation a generation ago — has been given a reboot for the age of globalisation with this commendable account."
—Financial Times

"Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier, the authors of this powerful, lucid, book, show us how the very rich hide their money…They should make journalists proud — and may even help to make the world a better place."
—New Statesman

"Bringing such a major story to book form in such a short time (and then translating it from the original German) is a challenge, but this text serves as an excellent explanation of the investigative work and the findings. .. Highly recommended."
—CHOICE Magazine

"With precision and purpose, THE PANAMA PAPERS is what 'Follow the Money' means."
—Bob Woodward, The Washington Post

"This is the inside story of how governments, corporations and organised crime groups have used the secret world of offshore jurisdictions to engage in systematic cheating and thieving. It's an almost perfect tale for the 21st century - the failure of democracy, the triumph of commercial power and greed, greed, greed.”
— Nick Davies, special correspondent, The Guardian

From the Publisher

2016-06-28
Hiding money in offshore accounts to keep it from the publicans is an old trick—but it is now so prevalent that, far from being "a minor part of our economic system," it is the system.The saga of the so-called Panama Papers, so much in the recent news, begins with the anonymous leaking of secret documents to Süddeutsche Zeitung journalist Obermayer. The leak became a flood that, writes Luke Harding, of Edward Snowden fame, in his foreword, "eventually amounted to 11.5 million documents, delivered in real-time installments," a trove far larger than the Snowden files. These records pertained to 214,000 offshore shell companies whose businesses were filtered through a Panamanian law firm, but that the flood came pouring down on German journalists spoke to the fact that the principal was a German émigré who may now be on the hook for violations of European Union regulations as a German citizen. (The legal case has only begun to unfold.) Yet Mossack Fonseca's clients, the beneficiaries of various schemes to keep taxable income under wraps, are breathtakingly international: they include the father of Britain's prime minister, much of Iceland's government, Nicaragua's president, and even the "best footballer in the world," to say nothing of "trails leading to FIFA and its president…various mafia organizations, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda…and to Vladimir Putin." Throw in numerous multinational corporations "like Amazon, Starbucks, and Apple," and you have splendid testimony to Karl Marx's observation that capital has no country and that capitalists are loyal only unto themselves and their shareholders. In surveying these many trails, the authors expose a shockingly corrupt system but not without offering twofold remedies, one of which is to mandate "an effective system for the automatic global exchange of information about bank accounts." A maddening, important indictment of the shadow economy that flourishes even as the legitimate economy suffers and just the thing to tip a person debating whether to join the Occupy movement or vote for Bernie Sanders over the edge.

Kirkus Reviews