Pandora Papers

The “Pandora Papers'' is a list of files featuring 35 former leaders and 300 public officials that were involved with offshore companies. Some of the most interesting discoveries due to the files include Putin’s secret assets in Monaco or the King of Jordan owning 70million pounds worth of property in the United States and the United Kingdom. The Pandora Papers include 14 sources with almost 12million files accounting for 2.94 Terabytes of data. The files include 6.4 million documents, almost 3 million images, 1.2million emails, almost 500,000 spreadsheets, and ~900,000 other types of files. The Pandora Papers are larger than other previous leaks such as the Offshore Leaks or the Panama Papers. These papers have resulted in allegations of corruption, money laundering, and global tax avoidance. The UK government took a huge hit considering their failure to register offshore property owners resulting in shady property deals in a total of around 400milion pounds. The main person involved in this is the King of Jordan who got over 100million dollars in property. This has caused questions of the UK’s ability to regulate offshore property purchases but the government says it will introduce a register for the offshore companies owning UK property. These property purchases can be used to hide money in places where it would be otherwise not noticed. For example, the president of  Azerbaijan bought his son a 33 million pound property and other companies bought the property in that area but the companies buying it were owned by friends of the president then transferred to Ilham Aliyev the former president of Azerbaijan. In general, the Pandora papers reveal corruption and money laundering of some of the world’s most important people.

SOURCE:https://www.bbc.com/news/world-58780465

-Anthony Kindness