O Consórcio Internacional de Jornalistas de Investigação (ICIJ) tornou pública a base de dados com 200 mil documentos mas ainda não estão disponíveis todas as informações entregues pela fonte anónima.
ALEX HOFFORD/EPA
O Consórcio Internacional de Jornalistas de Investigação (ICIJ) tornou pública esta segunda-feira uma parte significativa da base de dados que reúne parte da informação contida nos ficheiros da empresa Mossack Fonseca. A informação passou a estar disponível às 18h00 no siteoffshoreleaks.icij.org e envolve 200 mil documentos que referem mais de 214 mil sociedades offshore registadas em mais em 21 jurisdições e ligadas a pessoas de mais de 200 países. Os 11,5 milhões de documentos foram entregues ao consórcio por uma fonte anónima conhecida apenas por John Doe.
Os ficheiros sobre o escândalo dos “Papéis do Panamá” que revelou um vasto sistema de criação de offshores através de uma empresa de advogados do Panamá, a Mossak Fonseca, podem agora ser consultados por todos os interessados, na língua original, o inglês.
No entanto, a pesquisa na base de dados de dados não será fácil até porque os documentos disponibilizados muitas vezes só contêm informação parcial, como iniciais. Os nomes dos proprietários dosoffshore podem também não ser os verdadeiros donos dos mesmos e razão pela qual foram criados também pode não constar da documentação.
“Quando os dados forem divulgados, os utilizadores vão poder pesquisar e visualizar as redes à volta de milhares de entidades offshore, incluindo, quando for possível, os registos internos da Mossack Fonseca sobre o verdadeiro dono da empresa”, lê-se num comunicado do ICIJ.
O consórcio internacional frisou que a “a informação limitada e selecionada está a ser publicada por interesse público” e não haverá divulgação de dados pessoais. “A base de dados não vai incluir registos de contas bancárias nem transações financeiras, emails ou outra correspondência, passaportes e números de telefone”.
Os ficheiros dos Panama Papers foram entregues por uma fonte anónima, John Doe — que garante não trabalhar para nenhum governo, nem agência — ao jornal alemão Süddeutsche Zeitung, que depois os entregou para análise ao Consórcio Internacional de Jornalistas de Investigação, que tem parceiros com media de todo o mundo. Em Portugal, os dois meios de comunicação envolvidos são o Expresso e a TVI.
O que se pode encontrar
A base de dados agora disponibilizada pelo consórcio não corresponde ao total dos ficheiros que a fonte anónima entregou. A unidade de dados do ICIJ filtrou e reconstruiu a informação recebida. Segundo o jornal espanhol El Confidencial (um dos meios de comunicação que faz parte do consórcio internacional), quem aceder à base de dados pode ver quem são os acionistas dos offshores, os intermediários que ajudaram a criá-los e também os beneficiários finais por trás de cada empresa criada, desde que essa informação exista. Ou seja, através da base de dados que foi tornada pública só é possível aceder à informação já estruturada pelo consórcio.
O que não vai encontrar
Não será possível aceder à parte não estruturada dos ficheiros que o consórcio recebeu. Só uma (pequena) parte da informação contida nos 2,6 terabytes de documentos — a equivalente à que pode ser armazenada em cerca de 3.700 CD-ROMs comuns — está acessível. E tal como o Consórcio Internacional de Jornalistas já havia frisado em comunicado, os dados pessoais dos envolvidos nos Panama Papers não serão tornados públicos. Em termos de dados concretos, esta reserva significa que cerca de 4,8 milhões de emails, três milhões de conjuntos de dados, mais de dois milhões de documentos em formato PDF e centenas de milhares de imagens não serão encontrados na base de dados. O motor de busca disponibilizado na página do ICIJ não permite pesquisar esses documentos, muitos dos quais são incluem cópias de passaportes, dados de contas bancárias, documentos notariais e de certificados de criação deoffshores.
Como fazer a pesquisa
Para realizar uma pesquisa basta apenas introduzir o nome de uma empresa, uma pessoa ou um país na caixa de diálogo do motor de busca. Se os nome que procurou aparecerem, será também mostrada a informação relativa a outras empresas ou pessoas com quem estejam relacionados. Além dos dados dos Panama Papers, o ICIJ incluiu também informações relativas ao “Offshore Leaks”, uma fuga de informação que já havia revelado segredos de mais de 100 mil empresas, fundações e fundos criados em vários paraísos fiscais. O motor de busca vai permitir localizar as relações entre empresas ou pessoas que apareceram em ambas as fugas de informação. Para lá da pesquisa, é também possível descarregar os dados em bruto e a sua reutilização.
O que significa encontrar um nome conhecido
Se um nome de uma empresa ou pessoa conhecidos aparecer na base de dados, isso não significa que tenha cometido uma ilegalidade. Criar e ter uma empresa offshore, com o objetivo a obter melhores condições de tributação fiscal, não é uma prática ilegal. “Muitos offshores são utilizados com o objetivo de reduzir a carga fiscal de forma legal, não por ocultação de capitais” como explicou ao Observador o fiscalista Tiago Caiado Guerreiro.
Ou seja, só porque um nome aparece no motor de busca, isso não significa que foi cometida uma irregularidade. É preciso realizar pesquisas mais aprofundadas sobre determinado nome nomeadamente em documentos de outras bases de dados, como por exemplo, as relativas a ficheiros de empresas públicas de outros países. No caso de encontrar um nome de interesse público nessas circunstâncias pode entrar em contacto com Consórcio Internacional de Jornalistas de Investigação que, caso se justifique, realizará investigações mais aprofundadas.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists publishes today a searchable database that strips away the secrecy of nearly 214,000 offshore entities created in 21 jurisdictions, from Nevada to Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands.
The data, part of the Panama Papers investigation, is the largest ever release of information about offshore companies and the people behind them. This includes, when available, the names of the real owners of those opaque structures.
The database also displays information about more than 100,000 additional offshore entities ICIJ had already disclosed in its 2013 Offshore Leaks investigation.
ICIJ is publishing the information in the public interest.
The new data that ICIJ is now making public represents a fraction of the Panama Papers, a trove of more than 11.5 million leaked files from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, one of the world’s top creators of hard-to-trace companies, trusts and foundations.
ICIJ is not publishing the totality of the leak, and it is not disclosing raw documents or personal information en masse. The database contains a great deal of information about company owners, proxies and intermediaries in secrecy jurisdictions, but it doesn’t disclose bank accounts, email exchanges and financial transactions contained in the documents.
ICIJ's Offshore Leaks database.
In all, the interactive application reveals more than 360,000 names of people and companies behind secret offshore structures. As the data are from leaked sources and not a standardized registry, there may be some duplication of names.
The data was originally obtained from an anonymous source by reporters at the German newspaper Süeddeustche Zeitung, who asked ICIJ to organize a global reporting collaboration to analyze the files.
More than 370 reporters in nearly 80 countries probed the files for a year. Their investigations uncovered the secret offshore holdings of 12 world leaders, more than 128 other politicians and scores of fraudsters, drug traffickers and other criminals whose companies had been blacklisted in the US and elsewhere.
Their status as outlaws or public officials didn’t prevent them from obtaining shell companies in locales where secrecy laws often make it impossible for prosecutors and other investigators to trace their assets.
The files revealed, for example, that associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin secretly shuffled as much as $2 billion through banks and shadow companies.
The reaction to the Panama Papers was immediate and viral.
Outraged citizens took to the streets in Reykjavik, Malta and London while the hashtag #panamapaperstrended on Twitter for days after the story broke on April 3. The prime minister of Iceland resigned over the British Virgin Islands company he co-owned with his wife, while other world leaders scrambled to explain their secret holdings. It took UK’s Prime Minister David Cameron three days to publicly acknowledge he had profited from an investment fund, created by his father, that was incorporated in Panama and managed in the Bahamas. In Spain a minister resigned after being caught in a series of lies about his connections to offshore, and in Uruguay police arrested five individuals suspected of laundering money for a powerful Mexican drug cartel.
The Panama Papers underscore the fundamental injustices and inequalities created by the offshore system, media commentators and political leaders say.
“When taxes are evaded, when state assets are taken and put into these havens, all of these things can have a tremendous negative effect on our mission to end poverty and boost prosperity,” Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank, said as he opened the spring meetings of the World Bank and IMF in Washington soon after ICIJ and more than 100 other news organizations began revealing the results of the media collaboration’s investigation.
President Barack Obama, meanwhile, pointed out that the biggest problem was that many of the schemes revealed by the Panama Papers were legal. “It’s not that they’re breaking the laws, it’s that the laws are so poorly designed,” he said.
The revelations reignited the debate about the need for public registries in which information about who ultimately controls a company be accessible to all. The UK has made disclosure of beneficial owner data mandatory and public, but British overseas territories such the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands, some of the busiest offshore havens, have agreed to share that information only when it is requested by law enforcement.
Citing the Panama Papers, the US government also announced Thursday that it has sent legislation to Congress to create a centralized federal registry of the actual owners of any newly created company. The registry would help law enforcement authorities ferret out the real people behind anonymous companies used in money laundering and other wrongdoing.
The governments of Australia and Germany have said that they too intend to create public registries of company owners.
On Friday, the anonymous leaker of the Panama Papers, known only as “John Doe,” spoke publicly for the first time in a written statement and called out for concrete steps to combat tax havens. “In the European Union, every member state’s corporate register should be freely accessible, with detailed data plainly available on ultimate beneficial owners,” the source wrote. Doe added that the US “can clearly no longer trust its fifty states to make sound decisions about their own corporate data.”
The searchable database that ICIJ publishes today allows users to explore the networks of companies and people that used – and sometimes abused – the secrecy of offshore locales with the help of Mossack Fonseca and other intermediaries. The leaked data covers nearly 40 years, from 1977 through the end of 2015.
The data, which includes postal addresses, displays links to more than 200 countries and territories, from China to Chile. Users can filter the information by country and by offshore jurisdiction. They can also explore the role of banks, law firms and other gatekeepers of the financial system in facilitating the creation of offshore companies for high net worth individuals. For the first time, they can see details about shadowy Panamanian private foundations, including when available information about who controls them.
While the interactive application opens up a world that has never been shown in this much detail, not every owner of a company that appears in the Panama Papers shows up in the public database. This is because ownership information is often buried in emails, power-of-attorney letters and internal notes of Mossack Fonseca employees and cannot easily be extracted in a systematic manner. In addition, Mossack Fonseca often failed to collect the necessary information about the ultimate owners of companies, relying instead on banks and other intermediaries to keep track of that essential data.
Still, it is expected that Panama Papers revelations will continue to surface as regulators and ordinary citizens from around the globe probe the newly available data and find new connections that may have escaped reporters. Concerned citizens are encouraged to share tips with ICIJ and the Panama Papers journalists who continue to investigate the documents. The full dataset is also available for download.
“Transparency is not going to move backward,” Kim said in his World Bank spring meetings remarks, warning that those trying to avoid taxes or steal money from public treasuries should be “very careful” because they will eventually be tracked down. “The world is only going to become more and more transparent as we move forward.”
The data, part of the Panama Papers investigation, is the largest ever release of information about offshore companies and the people behind them. This includes, when available, the names of the real owners of those opaque structures.
The database also displays information about more than 100,000 additional offshore entities ICIJ had already disclosed in its 2013 Offshore Leaks investigation.
ICIJ is publishing the information in the public interest.
The new data that ICIJ is now making public represents a fraction of the Panama Papers, a trove of more than 11.5 million leaked files from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, one of the world’s top creators of hard-to-trace companies, trusts and foundations.
ICIJ is not publishing the totality of the leak, and it is not disclosing raw documents or personal information en masse. The database contains a great deal of information about company owners, proxies and intermediaries in secrecy jurisdictions, but it doesn’t disclose bank accounts, email exchanges and financial transactions contained in the documents.
ICIJ's Offshore Leaks database.The data was originally obtained from an anonymous source by reporters at the German newspaper Süeddeustche Zeitung, who asked ICIJ to organize a global reporting collaboration to analyze the files.
More than 370 reporters in nearly 80 countries probed the files for a year. Their investigations uncovered the secret offshore holdings of 12 world leaders, more than 128 other politicians and scores of fraudsters, drug traffickers and other criminals whose companies had been blacklisted in the US and elsewhere.
Their status as outlaws or public officials didn’t prevent them from obtaining shell companies in locales where secrecy laws often make it impossible for prosecutors and other investigators to trace their assets.
The files revealed, for example, that associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin secretly shuffled as much as $2 billion through banks and shadow companies.
The reaction to the Panama Papers was immediate and viral.
Outraged citizens took to the streets in Reykjavik, Malta and London while the hashtag #panamapaperstrended on Twitter for days after the story broke on April 3. The prime minister of Iceland resigned over the British Virgin Islands company he co-owned with his wife, while other world leaders scrambled to explain their secret holdings. It took UK’s Prime Minister David Cameron three days to publicly acknowledge he had profited from an investment fund, created by his father, that was incorporated in Panama and managed in the Bahamas. In Spain a minister resigned after being caught in a series of lies about his connections to offshore, and in Uruguay police arrested five individuals suspected of laundering money for a powerful Mexican drug cartel.
The Panama Papers underscore the fundamental injustices and inequalities created by the offshore system, media commentators and political leaders say.
“When taxes are evaded, when state assets are taken and put into these havens, all of these things can have a tremendous negative effect on our mission to end poverty and boost prosperity,” Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank, said as he opened the spring meetings of the World Bank and IMF in Washington soon after ICIJ and more than 100 other news organizations began revealing the results of the media collaboration’s investigation.
President Barack Obama, meanwhile, pointed out that the biggest problem was that many of the schemes revealed by the Panama Papers were legal. “It’s not that they’re breaking the laws, it’s that the laws are so poorly designed,” he said.
The revelations reignited the debate about the need for public registries in which information about who ultimately controls a company be accessible to all. The UK has made disclosure of beneficial owner data mandatory and public, but British overseas territories such the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands, some of the busiest offshore havens, have agreed to share that information only when it is requested by law enforcement.
Citing the Panama Papers, the US government also announced Thursday that it has sent legislation to Congress to create a centralized federal registry of the actual owners of any newly created company. The registry would help law enforcement authorities ferret out the real people behind anonymous companies used in money laundering and other wrongdoing.
The governments of Australia and Germany have said that they too intend to create public registries of company owners.
On Friday, the anonymous leaker of the Panama Papers, known only as “John Doe,” spoke publicly for the first time in a written statement and called out for concrete steps to combat tax havens. “In the European Union, every member state’s corporate register should be freely accessible, with detailed data plainly available on ultimate beneficial owners,” the source wrote. Doe added that the US “can clearly no longer trust its fifty states to make sound decisions about their own corporate data.”
The searchable database that ICIJ publishes today allows users to explore the networks of companies and people that used – and sometimes abused – the secrecy of offshore locales with the help of Mossack Fonseca and other intermediaries. The leaked data covers nearly 40 years, from 1977 through the end of 2015.
The data, which includes postal addresses, displays links to more than 200 countries and territories, from China to Chile. Users can filter the information by country and by offshore jurisdiction. They can also explore the role of banks, law firms and other gatekeepers of the financial system in facilitating the creation of offshore companies for high net worth individuals. For the first time, they can see details about shadowy Panamanian private foundations, including when available information about who controls them.
While the interactive application opens up a world that has never been shown in this much detail, not every owner of a company that appears in the Panama Papers shows up in the public database. This is because ownership information is often buried in emails, power-of-attorney letters and internal notes of Mossack Fonseca employees and cannot easily be extracted in a systematic manner. In addition, Mossack Fonseca often failed to collect the necessary information about the ultimate owners of companies, relying instead on banks and other intermediaries to keep track of that essential data.
Still, it is expected that Panama Papers revelations will continue to surface as regulators and ordinary citizens from around the globe probe the newly available data and find new connections that may have escaped reporters. Concerned citizens are encouraged to share tips with ICIJ and the Panama Papers journalists who continue to investigate the documents. The full dataset is also available for download.
“Transparency is not going to move backward,” Kim said in his World Bank spring meetings remarks, warning that those trying to avoid taxes or steal money from public treasuries should be “very careful” because they will eventually be tracked down. “The world is only going to become more and more transparent as we move forward.”
Next
The Panama Papers reading list · Don’t miss anything
How the One Percenters Divorce: Offshore Intrigue Plays Hide and Seek with MillionsFirm that practices no matrimonial law nonetheless plays big role when the superrich around the globe decide to split
Iceland’s Prime Minister Ducks Question But the Answer Catches Up with HimHe came to power after country’s financial collapse while hiding his offshore holdings of millions in bonds from Icelandic banks
Leak Ties Ethics Guru to Three Men Charged in FIFA ScandalSecret documents show how deeply the world of soccer has become enmeshed in the world of offshore havens
Panamanian Law Firm Is Gatekeeper To Vast Flow of Murky Offshore SecretsFiles show client roster that includes drug dealers, Mafia members, corrupt politicians and tax evaders — and wrongdoing galore
Giant Leak of Offshore Financial Records Exposes Global Array of Crime and CorruptionMillions of documents show heads of state, criminals and celebrities using secret hideaways in tax havens
All Putin’s Men: Secret Records Reveal Money Network Tied to Russian LeaderComplex offshore financial deals channel money and power towards a network of people and companies linked to President Vladimir Putin
Global Banks Team with Law Firms To Help the Wealthy Hide AssetsLeaked records show that hundreds of banks and their subsidiaries and branches registered nearly 15,600 shell companies
Law Firm’s Files Include Dozens of Companies and People Blacklisted by U.S. AuthoritiesGlobal law firm’s customers include suspected financiers of terrorism, nuclear weapons proliferators and gunrunners
Spies and Shadowy Allies Lurk in Secret With Help From Offshore FirmFirm helps CIA operatives and other characters — real or fanciful — from the world of espionage set up offshore companies to obscure their dealings
Leaked Files Offer Many Clues To Offshore Dealings by Top ChineseEight current and former members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the country's top decision makers, have relatives with secret offshore companies
Panama Papers Spark High-Level FIFA Resignation and Swiss Police RaidSwiss police searched the office of Europe's top soccer association, and a member of FIFA's ethics panel resigned following Panama Papers revelations
The Art of SecrecyLocked in the files of a Panama law firm are the answers to mysteries involving Van Goghs, Picassos, Rembrandts and other masterworks
Pakistan's PM Leaves Country, Spanish Minister ResignsNawaz Sharif faces growing pressure and calls for his resignation, a Spanish minister has stepped aside, and more governments are pledging reform as fallout from the Panama Papers revelations continues.
Iceland’s First Lady Linked to Offshore InvestmentsRecords in Panama Papers and Swiss Leaks files tie the wife of Iceland President Ólafur Grímsson to offshore companies and accounts
US Officials React to Panama Papers Disclosures With Get-Tough ProposalsObama administration proposes national registry documenting the real owners of shell companies and other measures aimed at fighting offshore chicanery
Panama Papers Source Offers Documents To Governments, Hints At More To ComeSource known only as John Doe says income inequality "one of the defining issues of our time" and calls on governments to address it.
Beyond Panama: Unlocking the world’s secrecy jurisdictionsThe publication of the Panama Papers companies data reveals new details about offshore entities usually kept hidden from the public in jurisdictions known for secrecy and opacity
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário