gerard ryle
Gerard Ryle led the international team that divulged the Panama Papers, the 11.5 million leaked documents from 40 years of activity of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca that have offered an unprecedented glimpse into the scope and methods of the secretive world of offshore finance.
we decided to do opposite.. share
native eyes on native names..
1\ share everything w everybody 2\ publish together on same day
350 reporters from 25 language groups… 376 sets of eyes… working shoulder to shoulder.. sharing info but telling no one..
became clear… in order to make biggest kind of noise.. first needed biggest kind of silence..
when reporter and make amazing discovery… your instinct is to scream out very loud..
when reporters wanted to scream.. screamed inside newsroom and then turned screams into stories by going outside docs ..to court records.. registers.. and putting questions to those intending to name.. reporters allowed to look at world thru diff lens…than everyone else…
you can imagine the pressure and ego.. that could have broken the pact.. but they didn’t .. then on april 3.. 8pm german time.. published in 76 countries…
first of many protests… first of many resignations..
irony – tech that has broken business model.. is allowing us to reinvent journalism itself… applying new methods.. and old journalism techniques….
by sharing.. were able to dig deep…
try obtaining a court injunction that would prevent telling of story in 76 countries.. a new era for journalism..
basic info about off shore world should be made public.. so now all available.. biggest resource of its kind now available..
follow Gerard:
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The Panama Papers are 11.5 million leaked documents that detail financial and attorney–client information for more than 214,488 offshore entities. The leaked documents were created by Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca; some date back to the 1970s.
The leaked documents illustrate how wealthy individuals and public officials are able to keep personal financial information private. While offshore business entities are often not illegal, reporters found that some of the Mossack Fonseca shell corporations were used for illegal purposes, including fraud, kleptocracy, tax evasion, and evading international sanctions.
“John Doe”, the whistleblower who leaked the documents to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), remains anonymous, even to the journalists on the investigation. “My life is in danger”, he told them.
In a May 6 statement, John Doe cited income inequality as the reason for his action, and said he leaked the documents “simply because I understood enough about their contents to realise the scale of the injustices they described”.
He added that he has never worked for any government or intelligence agency. He expressed willingness to help prosecutors if immune to prosecution. After SZ verified that the statement did come from the Panama Papers source, ICIJ posted the full document on its website.
Because of the amount of data, SZ asked the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) for help. Journalists from 107 media organizations in 80 countries analyzed documents detailing the operations of the law firm. After more than a year of analysis, the first news stories were published on April 3, 2016, along with 150 of the documents themselves.
The project represents an important milestone in the use of data journalism software tools and mobile collaboration.
The documents were quickly dubbed the Panama Papers. The Panamanian government strongly objects to the name; so do other entities in Panama and elsewhere. Some media outlets covering the story have used the name “Mossack Fonseca papers”.
be you. 