Wikileaks is resting - ICIJ has published a study of the largest leakage of data on offshore accounts of the powerful.

Fifteen months ago, an anonymous source handed over to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists ( ICIJ ) 2,500,000 files with a total volume of 260 gigabytes containing data on financial transactions of 130,000 organizations and individuals from 170 countries around the world who used offshore zones to evade taxes .

ICIJ brings together journalists from major global publications investigating the abuses of government and big business. A study of 30 years of offshore transaction history, which 86 journalists from 46 countries led for more than a year, is the largest project of the consortium in its history. According to the Tax Justice Network organization, the powerful people hide from 21 to 32 trillion dollars in the offshore "paradise" of the planet.

The files were transferred to ICIJ on the hard disk. The total amount of information was 160 times higher than the volume of the famous leak of confidential correspondence of politicians, published by the site Wikileaks. To analyze the four large databases contained on it, nearly two million emails and about five hundred thousand image files, PDF documents, HTML documents and spreadsheets, commercial software was used to analyze unstructured text ( NUIX and dtSearch ) and the Interdata self-written system for data exchange, designed specifically for this project. In addition, separate tools and scripts were created to solve specific subtasks. All graphic files are pre-passed through text recognizers.
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For communication, team members used closed forums — other secure international communication tools, such as mail encryption, did not survive because they were inconvenient to many participants and slowed down communication.

Offshore is the most complex global network of businesses and individuals, in which it is very difficult to find the real owners of many companies, accounts and luxury property. Offshore services are widely used by Zits-chairmen - for example, more than 21,000 companies were registered in the names of only 28 people, the most active of whom managed to be registered as directors of more than 4,000 companies.


An example of visualizing entity relationships in the NUIX system

Among the active users of offshore zones are politicians, senior officials, top managers, arms dealers, oligarchs. A separate section of the study is devoted to the political and business elite of the countries of the former USSR .

It becomes especially sad if we recall that many of these people publicly advocate the fight against money laundering and terrorist financing by restricting freedom of speech on the Internet, enforcing de-anonymization, banning the use of cryptography and decentralized electronic currencies, complaining about huge losses, which inflicts copyright and patent infringement on the economy and even try to bring order to the entire Internet at once , despite the fact that it was created and works fine without their participation.

PS In the meantime, the Bank of Cyprus accidentally destroyed important documents containing information about transactions that led to the collapse of the banking system of Cyprus.