A global investigation has exposed the secrets of some of Nigeria’s rich and powerful.
Gatekeepers News reports that a new global investigation exposing the foreign hideaways of some of the world’s most influential personalities is launching today after two years of discreet work by investigative journalists around the globe.
The project is known as The Pandora Papers.
The project is facilitated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which obtained a trove of 11.9 million confidential files.
The reporting, which is still ongoing, involves more than 600 journalists from 150 news organisations worldwide.
The collaboration has revealed the financial secrets of not less than 35 current and former world leaders.
The revelation also captured more than 330 public officials in more than 91 countries and territories.
The leaked files were retrieved from 14 offshore services firms worldwide that set up shell companies and other offshore entities for clients, many of them influential politicians, businesspersons and criminals, seeking to conceal their financial dealings.
ICIJ said, “the Pandora Papers investigation provides an unequalled perspective on how money and power operate in the 21st century — and how the rule of law has been bent and broken around the world by a system of financial secrecy enabled by the U.S. and other wealthy nations.
“In the popular imagination, the offshore system is often seen as a far-flung scattering of palm-shaded islands. The Pandora Papers show that the offshore money machine operates in every corner of the world, including the financial capitals of the richest and most powerful economies.
“It provides more information than what’s usually available to law enforcement agencies and cash-strapped governments.
“Large numbers of public officials and mega-wealthy individuals — who in some cases are one and the same — use the offshore system to manage, move and, often, hide their wealth.
“They play by different rules from the rest of humanity, in a game of intrigue and privilege that fuels crime and corruption and entrenches the power of the world’s economic and political elites.
“The Pandora Papers investigation is larger and more global than even ICIJ’s landmark Panama Papers investigation, which rocked the world in 2016, spawning police raids and new laws in dozens of countries and the fall of prime ministers in Iceland and Pakistan.
“The Panama Papers came from the files of a single offshore services provider: the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.
“The Pandora Papers shine a light on a far wider cross-section of the lawyers, middlemen and fixers who are at the heart of the offshore industry.
“The Pandora Papers lay bare the finances of many more country leaders and public officials than did the Panama Papers and provide more than twice as much information about the ownership of offshore companies.
“In all, the new leaks uncover the real owners of more than 29,000 offshore companies the owners come from more than 200 countries, with the largest contingents from Russia, the U.K., Argentina, China and Brazil.”
