Could your ex-husband be hiding money offshore? Maybe your annoying neighbour has a secret trust fund or your boss is dodging taxes by stashing profits offshore.

Starting Friday morning, there’s a way to find out.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) is adding details of almost 25,000 offshore corporations and trust funds to its offshore leaks database, allowing anyone to search for names and addresses of people with business in tax havens.

Simply being present in the database is not indicative of any wrongdoing or illegality.

Search the ICIJ’s database

Because many of the transactions carried out in tax havens are done in secret, without any corporate information made available to the public, the ICIJ’s database adds a basic layer of financial transparency that already exists in many countries around the world.

The database does not include the 13.5 million documents made available to investigative journalists around the world, including the Star. Instead, it mimics the public corporate registries in Canada, the U.S. and Europe by listing basic information including corporate directors, shareholders, addresses and dates.

The database already contains this information from the Panama Papers, as well as the Bahamas Leaks and Offshore Leaks.

The Paradise Papers adds 1,450 offshore companies and trust funds with Canadian links. There are Canadian 2,700 individuals and 560 Canadian companies from every province and territory except the Northwest Territories tied to those offshore structures.

While researching the Paradise Papers stories, reporters at the Star were only able to focus on a few dozen of the 3,300 Canadians named in the leak. But with thousands of eyes combing through the database once it’s put online, new stories of public interest are sure to emerge.

The Star continued to publish stories from the Panama Papers for almost a year after they were made public.

Marco Chown Oved can be reached at 416-869-4892 or moved@thestar.ca

Robert Cribb can be reached at 416-869-4411 or rcribb@thestar.ca

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