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- [Voiceover] From
UFO's to psychic powers,
and government conspiracies,
history is riddled with
unexplained events.
(doorbell)
You can turn back now,
or learn the stuff they
don't want you to know.
Here are the facts.
Sometime more than a year
before April of 2016,
an anonymous source,
identifying him or herself as John Doe,
contacted a German paper named
the Süddeutsche Zeitung
with an extraordinary offer.
This source claimed to
have access to around
2.6 terabytes of secret
data from a Panama based
law firm named Mossack Fonseca,
which sold offshore
companies around the globe.
The source did not want money
for this revelatory information.
Nor did the source want fame.
Instead, they would only say
they believed the firm was doing
real harm to the world,
and wanted this harm to cease.
The German paper accepted the leak.
They partnered with the
International Consortium
of Investigative Journalists,
and spent around a year
analyzing the documents
before going public with the largest leak
in human history.
So what, exactly, did they find?
Here's where it gets crazy.
At the time of this recording,
the world is still analyzing this data,
and what researchers have found so far
is profoundly disturbing.
In the documents, which range
from the 1970's to 2015,
Mossack Fonseca is shown to function,
as the German paper notes,
"as a hub of a global
industry led by major banks,
"legal firms, and asset
management companies
"secretly stewarding the estates
"of the world's rich and famous
"from politicians, FIFA
officials, fraudsters,
"and drug smugglers,
"to celebrities and
professional athletes."
In short, to hide,
transfer, and in some cases,
to clean dirty money.
By April 3rd of 2015,
the news had reached
populations in countries
around the planet.
Heads of State and
industry were implicated,
as well as kings.
Many of these individuals
worked through their relatives,
squirreling away cash and, in some cases,
circumventing sanctions.
Sources traced money to Vladmir Putin,
the Prime Minister of Iceland,
heads of Chinese government,
Middle Eastern royalty,
Indian celebrities,
and even Jackie Chan.
These powerful people
worked with Mossack Fonseca
to create shell companies
in other countries,
informally known as tax havens,
an act which, in itself,
is not inherently illegal.
However, journalists note the majority
of these operations were designed to hide
the identity of the actual owners,
in other words, the
people hiding the money.
Some of these clients are
out-and-out criminals,
like bank robbers and mafioso.
Other shell companies
appear to hold bribery money
from corrupt officials.
In some cases, this
means the leaks are proof
of illegal financial activity
by some of the worlds
wealthiest groups and individuals.
Others think there may be
more to the story, however,
asking why comparatively few
Americans have been named
in the leak so far.
Could this be a result of a conspiracy
by one group to expose the activities
of a geo-political rival?
Does the timing have anything
to do with the recent
Unaoil scandal?
At this point, it's hard to say.
Yet as journalists continue to dig,
and the average citizens of
countries around the world
begin asking tougher questions
about what their leaders
do behind the scenes,
one thing's becoming abundantly clear.
Mossack Fonseca and its
over 300,000 clients
have something they
don't want you to know.
And we've just begun
to scratch the surface.
To learn more about the emerging scandal
surrounding the Panama Papers,
tune in to our audio podcast
on stufftheydontwantyoutoknow.com.
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