Leaked data published Thursday by a group of international newspapers has revealed the names of 130,000 people from 170 nations making use of 10 offshore tax havens. The data was disclosed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), a Washington-based network of reporters in more than 60 countries, which in turn received it from an anonymous source.
The Guardian of London, one of the papers with access to the data, included oligarchs and high-ranking politicians in the list. In Germany, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung of Munich and the Hamburg-based broadcaster NDR said hundreds of Germans were among those named.
While owning an offshore account is not necessarily illegal, the documents shed light on the secret channels used to set up trusts and front companies as vehicles for hidden wealth. A total of 2.5 million documents, amounting to 260 gigabytes of data, have been leaked. They hail from two firms which specialise in setting up offshore investment vehicles. The reporters involved said the material had been secretly analysed and verified over a period of many months.
"Many of the world''s top banks have aggressively worked to provide their customers with secrecy-cloaked companies in the British Virgin Islands and other offshore hideaways," the ICIJ said. Deutsche Bank, Germany''s biggest bank and among those named, told dpa: "Deutsche Bank provides services to wealthy customers on the basis that they fully manage their own tax affairs and obey all tax laws and obligations to disclosure. Thomas Eigenthaler, head of the German tax inspectors'' union, told dpa that the existence of tax havens was no secret to investigators.