Panama Papers Visualized: Charts Bring Massive Data Leak to Life

A massive data breach has made headlines this week, shining new light on tax evasion and the wealthy. The leak of over 11.5 million documents has grabbed the world’s attention and spawned a global investigation know as the Panama Papers.

The records were obtained from an anonymous source by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The ICIJ then shared the data with major media partners, including the Guardian and the BBC.

The secretive industry of offshore finance has been a safe place for the rich and powerful to hide billions of dollars and skirt the law. Unfortunately, many of these people contribute to the seedy criminal underbelly, creating a safe haven for arms dealers, smugglers, drug traffickers, the mafia, and corrupt politicians.

It took 400 people over one year to comb through more than 2.6 TB of data. We will explain the key players involved, the data visualizations that are helping journalists tell their stories, and the social media buzz that is making the story go viral.

Key Players

Mossack Fonseca, an obscure law firm in Central America, is at the center of the world’s largest data leak. Mossack Fonseca registered over 200,000 companies, trusts, and foundations in secretive jurisdictions around the world.

The Panama Papers expose a cast of characters who use offshore companies to facilitate bribery, arms deals, tax evasion, financial fraud and drug trafficking. The email chains, invoices, and documents involved in the investigation paint a terrifying picture.

The data incriminates 140 politicians from more than 50 countries, including heads of state, their associates, ministers, and elected officials. Most notably, prime minister of Iceland Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson and close friends of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

For a complete list of those involved click the image below and explore ICIJ’s interactive data visualization of power players.

Panama Papers Visualized

Given the massive amount of data discovered, data visualizations have been a crucial tool for journalists who need to explain the data in a clear and concise way.

We have created a few graphs with Infogram to explain where in the world intermediaries are operating, the most popular tax havens and the countries where intermediaries are most active, according to the Panama Papers. 

Panama Papers Go Viral

Nothing shows the grand scale of this data leak quite like social media. Within hours, the Panama Papers were trending on Twitter. As of April 4th, there have been over 1.4M tweets using the hashtag #PanamaPapers. The hashtag is also trending at the top on Facebook.

People are also searching for the Panama Papers on Google like crazy, with the numbers jumping dramatically after April 3rd. The Google Trends chart below shows the search interest over time. Search interest is both indexed and normalized, meaning the 0 – 100 values are relative, not absolute, measures.

Most of the services offered by the offshore industry are legal, providing they are used by law abiding customers. Mossack Fonseca says they have a ‘thorough due diligence’ process and always follow the ‘letter and spirit of the law.’  The company says it has operated beyond reproach for 40 years and has never been charged with criminal wrong-doing.

The data leak has put pressure on governments around the globe to crack down on tax minimization and the shady tax haven industry.

Do you need to make charts based on the data found in the Panama Papers? Anyone can access the information found during the investigation on their own. Take the data you find and trust Infogram to help you create informative, shareable data visualizations.