The Panama Papers exposed an industry for separating assets from their owners

The Panama Papers began with 11.5 million records from Mossack Fonseca. ICIJ, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and their partners used them to connect offshore entities with the people and intermediaries behind them.

The reporting’s structural finding was the importance of ordinary professional services. Banks, lawyers, company incorporators, and nominee directors could divide a transaction across jurisdictions, leaving each public record with only part of the story. The files described 214,488 offshore entities and decades of business.

Offshore incorporation itself was not proof of illegality. The investigation distinguished lawful arrangements from evidence of hidden conflicts, weak checks, and alleged misconduct. Mossack Fonseca denied promoting illegal acts and defended its compliance practices.

Read today, the original article remains valuable for its account of how secrecy is manufactured. The impressive leak size mattered because the documents reconnected information that the corporate structures had deliberately separated.