Major data leak involving politicians, Fifa officials, fraudsters, drug smugglers and celebrities

[Stromboli1]

"Biggest leak in the history of data journalism just went live, and it's about corruption." -Edward Snowden

http://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/articles/56febff0a1bb8d3c3495adf4/

Apparently this is going to be huge so I made a thread

[Stromboli1]

The data
The Panama Papers include approximately 11.5 million documents – more than the combined total of the Wikileaks Cablegate, Offshore Leaks, Lux Leaks, and Swiss Leaks. The data primarily comprises e-mails, pdf files, photo files, and excerpts of an internal Mossack Fonseca database. It covers a period spanning from the 1970s to the spring of 2016.

 

[Stromboli1]

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/03/panama-papers-money-hidden-offshore

BBC says $2b in laundered money is linked to Putin.

[Stromboli1]

Mathew Ingram@mathewi
Editor of Süddeutsche Zeitung responded to the lack of U.S. individuals in the documents, saying "Just wait for what is coming next"

[Stromboli1]

[Prettyphile]

I'm ready, bring on the shiitstorm!

 

[Prettyphile]

 

Just recently an absolutely massive and unprecedented leak was made public, involving more than 11 million documents, which expose the secret financial dealings of some of the worlds most wealthy individuals from athletes to celebrities to bankers and more, as well as over 100 politicians from around the world, and even 12 current or former world leaders. In total more than 200 thousand companies, foundations, and trusts are contained within the incriminating leaked information.

This leak was made public by Sueddeutsche Zeitung, a German news outlet, which about a year ago was contacted by an anonymous source, who over several months of time submitted a total of 2.6 terabytes of data for their journalists to dig through. They quickly realized that what they were looking at was a near complete overview of a little known law firm in Panama called Mossack Fonseca, who apparently had their hands in basically all aspects of financial shadiness possible, including offshore holdings for drug dealers, the mafia, corrupt politicians and super wealthy tax evaders, as well as other forms of shadiness such as involvement in the African diamond trade and international black markets and much more.

This data dump, which is now being referred to as the "Panama Papers", is said to include a wide range of sensitive information dating from 1977 all the way to almost present day (December 2015), and includes e-mails, contracts, bank records, property deeds, passport copies, and more, on a wide range of highly prominent individuals from around the globe. The document dump occurred in several waves, over a period of a few months’ time, and appear to of all come from a single individual. When Sueddeutsche Zeitung asked the anonymous whistleblower why they were doing this, they got the noble response, "I want to make these crimes public".

Here is a bit more information on how the leak took place, as reported by Suddeutsche Zeitung, which really deserves applause for their hard work on this story.

"Over a year ago, an anonymous source contacted the Suddeutsche Zeitung and submitted encrypted internal documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that sells anonymous offshore companies around the world. These shell firms enable their owners to cover up their business dealings, no matter how shady.
In the months that followed, the number of documents continued to grow far beyond the original leak. Ultimately, Suddeutsche Zeitung acquired about 2.6 terabytes of data, making the leak the biggest that journalists had ever worked with. The source wanted neither financial compensation nor anything else in return, apart from a few security measures.
The data provides rare insights into a world that can only exist in the shadows. It proves how a global industry led by major banks, legal firms, and asset management companies secretly manages the estates of the world’s rich and famous: from politicians, Fifa officials, fraudsters and drug smugglers, to celebrities and professional athletes."

Anyways, it will be interesting to see how this leak develops over time, as this information was just now made public, and the overall global response is yet to be fully seen. Anyways, as I stated before, for more information on the "Panama Papers" leak, check out the links below, which go into a lot more detail, but before I go, I just wanted to throw out a bit of outside the box thinking for a minute.

When I sit back and look at this specific leak and the prominent people involved, I can't help but notice something... although some of the most wealthy and prominent people in the world are mentioned, a lot of known-to-be corrupt people that I would expect to be on the list, are not present. Just to play devils advocate for a minute, I want to toss out the idea that there is a possibility that this is actually a wanted leak, designed to expose the crimes of the elite on a mass scale, but only targeting a specific portion or tier of the elite, leaving the upper crust untouched. Going even further it could technically be used to remove a lot of the lower tier competition across the globe, that at this point in the global agenda or transition, are becoming seen as expendable.

[jj3]

Sad to say, but it's pretty exciting lol

[frenchkiki]

I never thought someone will be interested it that?

Rich people & companies are hiding their money? Really?

What a chock!

[17 Moments of Spring]

 

[17 Moments of Spring]

On 2016. 04. 03. at 11:42 PM, Stromboli1 said:

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/03/panama-papers-money-hidden-offshore

BBC says $2b in laundered money is linked to Putin.

 

business as usual

 

Quote

You’d be forgiven for thinking, given the above picture, that the Panama Papers had something to do with Vladimir Putin. Maybe he was a kingpin of the whole thing. Maybe he was, at least, among the 12 world leaders implicated in various shady financial practices – along with Petro Poroshenko, the saviour of Ukrainian democracy, and the King of Saudi Arabia (dad of the recent Légion d’Honneur winner).

...

Neither of his articles mentions by name any of the 12 world leaders, past and present, actually identified in the documents, nor do they mention David Cameron’s dad, who is also in there. No, they focus on a cellist friend of Putin’s, talk about his daughter’s marriage, and include an awful lot of diagrams with big arrows that point at pictures of…Vladimir Putin. This is, apparently, all evidence of…something.

 

The only important, or even true, phrase Harding uses appears at the very top of this article:

"…the president’s name does not appear in any of the records…"

 

http://off-guardian.org/2016/04/03/panama-papers-cause-guardian-to-collapse-into-self-parody/

[Stromboli1]

That didn't take long...

 

Owen Gibson @owen_g

Fifa president Gianni Infantino pulled into corruption scandal by Panama Papers bit.ly/1ozdHWI

[17 Moments of Spring]

Quote

Sadly, some important duties of journalism, such as applying evenhanded standards on human rights abuses and financial corruption, have been so corrupted by the demands of government propaganda – and the careerism of too many writers – that I now become suspicious whenever the mainstream media trumpets some sensational story aimed at some “designated villain.”

Far too often, this sort of “journalism” is just a forerunner to the next “regime change” scheme, dirtying up or delegitimizing a foreign leader before the inevitable advent of a “color revolution” organized by “democracy-promoting” NGOs often with money from the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy or some neoliberal financier like George Soros.

...

Or, the “corruption” for a demonized leader can be a modest luxury, such as Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s “sauna” in his personal residence, a topic that got front-page treatment in The New York Times and other Western publications seeking to justify the violent coup that drove Yanukovych from office in February 2014.

 

Incidentally, both Ortega and Yanukovych had been popularly elected but were still targeted by the U.S. government and its operatives with violent destabilization campaigns. In the 1980s, the CIA-organized Nicaraguan Contra war killed some 30,000 people, while the U.S.-orchestrated “regime change” in Ukraine sparked a civil war that has left some 10,000 people dead. Of course, in both cases, Official Washington blamed Moscow for all the trouble.

 

In both cases, too, the politicians and operatives who gained power as a result of the conflicts were arguably more corrupt than the Nicaraguan Sandinistas or Yanukovych’s government. The Nicaraguan Contras, whose violence helped pave the way for the 1990 election of U.S.-backed candidate Violeta Chamorro, were deeply implicated in cocaine trafficking. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Sordid Contra-Cocaine Saga.”]

 

Today, the U.S.-supported Ukrainian government is wallowing in corruption so deep that it has provoked a new political crisis.[See Consortiumnews’com’s “Reality Peeks Through in Ukraine.”]

Ironically, one of the politicians actually named in the Panama Papers for having established a shadowy offshore account is the U.S.-backed Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, although he got decidedly second-billing to the unnamed Putin. (Poroshenko denied there was anything improper in his offshore financial arrangements.)

...

While the American neocons may fantasize that they can generate enough economic pain and political dissension inside Russia to achieve Putin’s removal, their expectation that he will be followed by a pliable leader like the late President Boris Yeltsin, who will let U.S. operatives back in to resume plundering Russia’s riches, is almost certainly a fantasy.

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/04/04/corruption-as-a-propaganda-weapon/

[17 Moments of Spring]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-05/shots-fired-wikileaks-accuses-panama-papers-leaker-being-soros-funded-soft-power-tax

[17 Moments of Spring]

Quote

The Panama Papers leak could hand Bernie Sanders the keys to the White House

For some Americans, Hillary Clinton is the embodiment of a global elite which benefits from tax avoidance schemes. Bernie Sanders, her opponent, is its antithesis

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-panama-papers-could-hand-bernie-sanders-the-keys-to-the-white-house-a6969481.html

 

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/5/did_bernie_sanders_predict_the_panama

[ILUVAdrianaLima]

Panama Papers Reveal Clinton’s Kremlin Connection

http://observer.com/2016/04/panama-papers-reveal-clintons-kremlin-connection/

Hmm, and she has the nerve to run as a presidential candidate and call Bernie unfit to lead, what a piece of...

[jj3]

^ I beg for a Sander v Trump round for these elections...

[17 Moments of Spring]

^ maybe Bernie is armed with the Malleus Maleficarum

[17 Moments of Spring]

Quote

In an exclusive interview Tuesday from Munich, Birkenfeld said he doesn't think the source of the 11 million documents stolen from a Panamanian law firm should automatically be considered a whistleblower like himself. Instead, he said, the hacking of the Panama City-based firm, called Mossack Fonseca, could have been done by a U.S. intelligence agency.

 

"The CIA I'm sure is behind this, in my opinion," Birkenfeld said.

 

Birkenfeld pointed to the fact that the political uproar created by the disclosures have mainly impacted countries with tense relationships with the United States. "The very fact that we see all these names surface that are the direct quote-unquote enemies of the United States, Russia, China, Pakistan, Argentina and we don't see one U.S. name. Why is that?" Birkenfeld said. "Quite frankly, my feeling is that this is certainly an intelligence agency operation."

 

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/12/swiss-banker-whistleblower-cia-behind-panama-papers.html