I’ll confess that my jaw dropped when I looked beyond the headlines about the Panama Papers last spring and began to read the fine print. “Panama Papers” is shorthand for the widely publicized report of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, originally published on April 3, 2016. The story broke simultaneously on the I.C.I.J. Web site and in newspapers around the world and detailed what had been going on behind a cloak of secrecy. An enormous leak of 11.5 million documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca provided the investigative journalists with a trove of information about 200,000 entities incorporated in offshore havens—companies whose real owners were difficult or impossible to trace. The newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung had obtained the documents; realizing that to analyze the data was beyond its own capacities, it enlisted the help of the I.C.I.J., which worked for a year through 107 media organizations in 80 countries before breaking the story.

Panama is but one of a large number of “offshore” corporate havens, which include the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, and the Cayman Islands. Often, the owners of a corporation in one secrecy haven will be a web of corporations incorporated into another. Why the secrecy and the dizzying complexity? In many instances, it is to throw law-enforcement agencies, tax collectors, and investigative journalists off the scent.

The range of alleged activities encompassed by the Panama Papers was broad—from tax evasion and tax avoidance to money laundering associated with a variety of nefarious activities. The range of public figures who made an appearance in the documents was equally impressive. The publicity brought down the Icelandic prime minister, and forced Britain’s prime minister at the time, David Cameron, to explain why his father’s name appeared in the documents. The prominence of Putin associates in the Panama Papers led to accusations (from Moscow) that the revelations were a Western plot. China, too, had its share of prominent people represented.

As Mark Pieth, a Swiss lawyer and anti-corruption expert at the University of Basel, put it in an interview this summer with The Guardian: “I have had a close look at the so called Panama Papers and I must admit that, even as an expert on economic and organized crime, I was amazed to see so much of what we talk about in theory was confirmed in practice.” The newspaper itself noted that the Panama Papers may include “evidence of crimes such as money laundering for child prostitution rings.”

Years ago, after serving as chief economist of the World Bank—where I saw the role that corruption, tax evasion, and money laundering play in bleeding developing countries of money they need for development—I had urged that secrecy havens be shut down. With Leif Pagrotsky, Sweden’s trade minister at the time, I published an opinion article on the subject in the Financial Times. These centers are a cancer. The lack of transparency at their heart undermines the functioning of the global economy. What the Panama Papers showed was that matters were far worse than I had imagined.

So it was with some surprise that, just a couple of weeks after the release of the Panama Papers, I received a call from Panama’s vice president, Isabel Saint Malo, asking me to serve on a special commission that Panama was setting up. The purpose was to recommend steps that Panama could take to promote transparency in its offshore financial-services industry—not just the banks but the full array of “service providers,” including its law firms, one of which had inadvertently opened a window onto what was going on. I wondered if the government was serious. It was obvious that officials were concerned about Panama’s public image. They repeatedly pointed out the unfairness of the title “Panama Papers,” since only a fraction of the bad activities had actually occurred in Panama. But the central player was Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm that had used its expertise in secrecy—garnered from years of operating in Panama—to expand globally. Panama was perhaps particularly unhappy because it had worked so hard to live down the reputation earned under strongman Manuel Noriega, when it had been such a key logistics hub for the drug trade that the U.S. felt it had to invade.