One year on, the impact of the Panama Papers has been profound. Government officials have resigned. Executives have been sacked. Criminal charges have been filed. But, arguably, the biggest impact the exposé has had is what the documents tells us about the true value of transparency as a tool to uncover wrongdoing and to hold the powerful to account.
When the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released the Panama Papers last April, the sheer size of the leak was shocking; millions of documents and hundreds of thousands of secret companies, spanning across 2 terabytes of data. Yet, what the data revealed was even more profound: a full cross section of offshore financial industry secrecy that showed countless links to organized crime and tax evasion schemes, and exposed a myriad of public officials and high-powered executives using this shadow financial system for private gain.
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