11 Interesting Facts About The Panama Papers Leak

The most recent whistleblower leak was a political nightmare, but a journalistic feast.

1. Journalists researched for more than one year to publish the leak.

Süddeutsche Zeitung, the largest German national subscription daily newspaper, was first contacted by the whistleblower in February of 2015.

2. 400 journalists from more than 100 media in over 80 countries were involved in this project.

Süddeutsche Zeitung turned over the received data to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). An international team of journalists participated in the research behind the final published leak—including reporters at BBC, the Guardian and Le Monde in France.

3. It was the largest leak in history.

The leak included 2.6 terabytes of data, and implicated a significant number of current leaders in various countries around the world. According to statistics by Süddeutsche Zeitung, the scale of the Panama Papers Leaks is more than 1,000 times larger than Wikileaks in 2010—which included 1.7 gigabytes worth of data.

4. We still don’t know who the whistleblower is.

The whistleblower first greeted reporters with “Hello, this is John Doe.” They have since then requested to remain completely anonymous, and only communicated through encrypted files. Of course, there are always conspiracy theories going around. For example, some hypothesize that the US was the source of the leak.

5. The timing of the leak was suspected to target Putin.

Russia is welcoming its Parliamentary Elections this September, and Putin’s political standing probably suffered from his ties to a $2 million of questionable nature revealed in the leaked data.

6. Big names in journalism worked on the project.

Including Katharine Viner, the first female Editor-in-Chief of the Guardian; Owen Gibson, chief sports correspondent at the Guardian, worked on leaked data involving athletes and FIFA.

7. Reporters were worried that they might be hacked by Russia’s security Agency, the FSB.

Because of Putin’s potential involvement, the journalists worked hard to keep the information secure from hacking—especially hacking by Russia’s government security branch.

8. Some reporters suffered from retaliation by their local government.

In Venezuela, a journalist who participated in the research team to help publish the data leaks was fired from her news organization. In a few other less democratic countries, reporters are in danger of retaliation of varying degrees by their own government implicated by their journalism work.

9. Almost half of 11.5 million leaked documents are emails.

About 5 million files were emails, 3 million in database formats, 1 million image files and about 300,000 in plain text.

10. Panama is not very happy.

Some Panamanians have started a petition to remove the country’s name from the whole scandal. They think the incident should be referred to as the "Mossak Fonseca Papers Leak,” after the law firm where the leaked documents came from.

11. The leak implicated current government officials in more than 30 countries around the world.

There are countries in every continent, minus Antarctica, of course.