Introduction

ICIJ’s investigative series on offshore secrecy — which draws from a cache of 2.5 million secret records — has ignited reactions around the globe.

Since the initial release of stories by the ICIJ and its media partners across the world, public officials have issued statements, governments have launched investigations, and politicians and journalists have been debating the implications of the records and the reporting.

Among the latest reactions and responses:

A leading political party in Taiwan vowed to promote a new measure to crack down on offshore tax avoidance as its top agenda item. The Democratic Progressive Party, Taiwan’s leading opposition party, said that it would seek to pass an amendment to Taiwan’s Income Tax Act prohibiting corporations from using overseas subsidiaries and paper companies to avoid taxation. The proposal came days after ICIJ and its partner in Taiwan, CommonWealth Magazine, revealed that more than 16,000 Taiwanese, including more than a dozen billionaire family owners of some of Taiwan’s largest corporations, owned offshore companies.

The tax commissioner of China, Wang Jun, pledged that China would step up its participation in international efforts to combat tax evasion and crack down on tax fraud within the nation. The move came as Chinese authorities were still scrambling to block internet access in China to the China Leaks reports by ICIJ and its partners.

Chinese authorities moved aggressively to block online access to news reports exposing the secrecy-cloaked offshore holdings of China’s political and financial elites. Censorship of the latest investigation, which draws on previously secret records of nearly 22,000 clients with addresses in mainland China and Hong Kong, was unusual in its broad international scope. In addition to ICIJ’s own website, Chinese authorities blocked the sites of ICIJ publishing partners including Spain’s El País, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., and the U.K. and U.S. editions of The Guardian, according to reports from news organizations and analytics by GreatFire.org. In Beijing, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Qin Gang dismissed the story calling it “hardly convincing” and said it raises “suspicions over the motives behind it.”

Incorporations of new offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands declined sharply last year, falling 21 percent from 2012. The change echoes a recent report by the company Offshore Incorporations Limited that found that ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks had created a “crisis of confidence” in the offshore industry, with more than three-quarters of the offshore professionals it surveyed said that ICIJ’s stories have reduced demand for offshore financial vehicles or prompted clients to move their business from one haven to another. Most of the secret accounts exposed by Offshore Leaks were incorporated in the BVI. The recent attention to financial secrecy has also prompted the BVI and the Cayman Islands to enter into consultations on whether they should develop a registry that reveals the real owners of companies incorporated there, known as a “beneficial ownership” registry. UK Prime Minister David Cameron has been pressing British territories such as the BVI and the Caymans to improve their financial transparency, and pledged last fall to make the UK the first country in the world to create a publicly available beneficial ownership registry. A recent paper issued by the BVI solicited comments from the public and “in particular” the financial services industry on whether it should create an ownership registry.

The number of Germans voluntarily disclosing secret offshore accounts tripled in 2013, according to the chairman of the German tax union, Thomas Eigenthaler. The disclosures are expected to result in a surge of revenue to the German treasury. Eigenthaler said that ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks investigation was a major factor that sparked the increased disclosures, as well as the admission by a prominent soccer club manager and former star player that he had a secret bank account in Switzerland.

The Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, Igor Shuvalov, has repatriated his and his wife’s offshore assets to comply with a Russian law prohibiting state officials from holding their wealth abroad. An offshore company belonging to Shuvalov’s wife, Olga Shuvalov, was revealed in April by ICIJ. Shuvalov, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, had pledged to return the assets to Russia soon after they were exposed. The move comes during a broad crackdown on offshore tax avoidance by Putin. Last week, Putin announced that Russian-owned companies registered in offshore jurisdictions would be forced to pay Russian taxes, and that companies registered abroad would be barred from getting funding from the budget or from state banks.

The European Parliament voted last week to strengthen its requirements for automatic exchange of tax data between EU member nations. The new rules, approved by 360 votes to 59, will require nations to collect and share data by 2017 on additional types of income such as employment, property and capital gains. In endorsing the measure, the Parliament voted to reject the “availability principle,” which would limit nations’ data sharing obligations to information that they decided independently to collect. “This important measure… responds to the challenges raised by [ICIJ’s] Offshore Leaks and the staggering €1 trillion annual losses of tax revenues in the EU,” stated a summary of the reform that was prepared by the European Parliament’s Green Party.

The Danish Tax Minister announced a plan to crack down on offshore tax havens on the day after the last of a four-part series of documentaries about tax havens was aired by ICIJ’s Danish partner, DR Documentary at Danish Broadcasting Corporation. Danish tax authorities will devote $7.3 million to pursue both individuals who hide money offshore and their professional advisers. The plan is expected to result in “a substantial number of new cases about illegal use of tax havens,” said Holger K. Nielsen, the Danish Tax Minister. The documentaries exposed reliance on offshore havens by a leading Danish bank as well as a major law firm. One film used a hidden camera to reveal Jyske Bank, Denmark’s third largest bank, advising an undercover journalist posing as a wealthy client to stash his money offshore in a plan that experts described as immoral and in some parts illegal. Others revealed the offshore tax advice given by Bech-Bruun, one of Denmark’s leading law firms, and by the massive accounting firm EY.

Authorities in Ireland have recovered 4.3 million euros in settlements after receiving offshore tax data shared by French authorities, and are expecting “a very significant amount of data” on offshore holdings from the governments of U.S., Britain and Australia. The French data was obtained from Herve Falciani, a whistleblower and former employee of HSBC. Much of the data from the U.S., Britain and Australia was initially unveiled in Offshore Leaks.

The Colombian government announced new regulations that will slap a 33-percent tax on financial transactions between Colombian companies or individuals and third parties in 44 countries identified as tax havens. “The party is over for those who were taking advantage of tax havens,” Mauricio Cárdenas, the country´s economics minister, told local journalists. Colombia’s top tax official, Juan Ricardo Ortega, said ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks stories “without doubt helped the government push forward regulations” that had been blocked for nearly a decade. The secret offshore files obtained by ICIJ revealed that the sons of former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe were shareholders in a British Virgin Islands company.

Tax authorities in India say they have sent notices to more than 500 individuals whose offshore holdings were revealed earlier this year by ICIJ and The Indian Express. These individuals included two members of Parliament and several prominent industrialists, and the inquiries from the income tax department seek details and transactions of their offshore companies and trusts. A new list of individuals with offshore holdings found in the Offshore Leaks database was also published earlier this week, and included a decorated former civil service officer and the wife of Delhi’s energy secretary.

South Korean authorities announced they had uncovered evidence that the family of former dictator Chun Doo-Hwan had engaged in illegal offshore transactions. Earlier this year, ICIJ and the Korea Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that Chun’s son, Chun Jae-kook, had a secret offshore company in the British Virgin Islands. On October 8 the Korea Customs Service announced that it had found that offshore companies held by Chun’s family, including those belonging to Chun Jae-Kook, were involved in illegal foreign currency transactions. The Korea Customs Service said the transactions were intended to evade taxes and that it had informed Korean state prosecutors of its findings. The developments are the latest in a series of responses to ICIJ and the Korea Center for Investigative Journalism’s reporting, which have also included raids by Korean prosecutors on both men’s homes and an agreement by Chun’s family to pay $154 million in fines.

The Anti-Corruption Commission in Bangladesh decided on September 30 to open an investigation into the offshore activities of Kazi Zafarullah, a leading member of Bangladesh’s governing Awami League political party. In July, ICIJ and its reporting partners at the Bangladeshi daily New Age revealed that Zafarullah and his wife, Nilufer Zafar, were directors and shareholders of two offshore companies. The couple had also opened a joint account at the Singaporean branch of the Swiss bank UBS AG. The Anti-Corruption Commission decided to investigate Zafarullah’s activities after a two-month assessment of ICIJ and New Age’s findings, an official with the commission said.

The son of disgraced former South Korean president Chun Doo-hwan issued a public apology and vowed that his family would pay the government $154 million in fines related to corruption during Chun’s rule. Prior to the announcement, the former dictator’s family had claimed for years that Chun was bankrupt and unable to pay the fines. But earlier this year, ICIJ and the Korea Center for Investigative Journalism revealed that Chun’s son, Chun Jae-kook, had a secret offshore company in the British Virgin Islands. Chun Jae-kook denied any connection between his offshore holdings and his father, but South Korean prosecutors recently raided both men’s homes in a search for hidden assets.

Members of the G20 announced new measures to combat offshore tax evasion, including a plan to automatically share tax data among G20 nations by the end of 2015. Today’s G20 Leaders Declaration, released from a summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, also pledged the G20’s assistance to developing countries seeking to establish automatic tax information sharing, but stopped short of providing a timeline for doing so. According to the advocacy group Global Financial Integrity, illicit financial flows cost developing countries nearly $6 trillion between 2001 and 2010.