Paradise Papers

The Paradise Papers are a set of 13.4 million documents relating to offshore investment, leaked to the public on 5 November 2017. The documents originate from the offshore law firm Appleby, the corporate services providers Estera and Asiaciti Trust, and business registries in 19 tax jurisdictions. They contain the names of more than 120,000 people and companies.

Among those whose financial affairs are mentioned are Queen Elizabeth II,[4] President of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos, and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. According to the Boston Consulting Group, the amount of money involved is around $10 trillion. In late October 2017, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) approached the offshore law firm Appleby with allegations of wrongdoing. Appleby said that some of its data had been stolen in a cyber attack the previous year, and denied ICIJ's allegations.

After the documents were published, the company stated there was "no evidence of wrongdoing". The documents were acquired by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which was also the newspaper that obtained the Panama Papers in 2016. The data includes a total of 13.4 million documents – comprising around 1.4 terabytes – from two offshore service providers, Appleby and Asiaciti Trust, and from the company registers of 19 tax havens.

In contrast to the Panama Papers, many countries were involved in this data leak rather than a single country. The name Paradise Papers was chosen as all of the places involved are so-called tax havens, or "tax paradises." The Süddeutsche Zeitung contacted the ICIJ which has been investigating the documents, together with 100 media partners.

ICIJ made the data available to media partners on a platform programmed specifically for this project. That allowed journalists across the globe to work on the material around the clock.The documents were released by ICIJ on 5 November 2017, according to Wikipedia.

The leak, called the Paradise Papers, contains 13.4 million documents from two leading firms in offshore finance. Most of the data leak came from Appleby, a Bermuda-based legal services provider, that facilitated setting up of offshore firms with low or zero tax rates. Singapore-based Asiaciti was the other firm that helped wealthy to move money to tax havens. India ranks 19th out of 180 countries in terms of the number of names in the offshore data leak. A total of 714 Indians have been named, according to Business Today.