"Dirty little secrets: Inside the 'Wikileaks' of the ultra-rich and ultra-powerful"

"The documents were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared with Fusion and over 100 other media outlets by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) as part of the Panama Papersinvestigation. The massive leak is estimated to be 100 times bigger than Wikileaks. It's believed to be the largest global investigation in history... The results of the yearlong investigation encompass 214,488 corporate entities – among them companies, trusts, and foundations –controlled by everyone from heads of state, politicians, Forbes-listed billionaires, to drug lords, businesses blacklisted by the US government, scammers, and FIFA officials...

Pereyra says that losses in Uruguay alone amount to $4 million, and that many investors were middle-class. Attorneys for investors say they have identified multiple shell corporations associated with OpenWorld and Swiss Group, and Pereyra says those shells played an important role in the alleged fraud. “They have an appearance. You trusted Swiss Group. You saw a brand, you saw a logo,” he explains. “They tried to create a trust in investors that did not exist. It did not exist because it was a false corporation. It was nothing. Empty.”...

Many times Mossack Fonseca has had no clue which nefarious characters were doing what with the companies the firm created – as when Jurgen discovered in 2005, according to internal emails, that he was the registered agent and listed as the director for a company controlled by the Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero...

“While we [in the U.S. talk] about offshore accounts in other countries, I think we have a lot of room for improvement here to promote transparency,” says Patrick Fallon, Washington-based head of the FBI’s financial crimes section. In addition to enabling money laundering, secrecy abets public corruption and insider trading – all sorts of financial crimes, really. “It is a significant impediment to our investigations when we can’t determine who the true owner is of a company,” Fallon says... This past winter, Transparency International listed Delaware on a Top 9 list of “Grand Corruption” cases around the world. Attorneys in Uruguay for the OpenWorld investors say they discovered a Swiss Group shell company registered in Delaware."

http://interactive.fusion.net/dirty-little-secrets/

TBH dunno if this is worth reading in its entirety unless you are into the more wonky details. It doesn't really get into actual impacts or reveal big dynamics that I didn't know about or anything.

Related: I gained a much stronger understanding of these kinds of companies in general from "[Planet Money] Episode 390: We Set Up An Offshore Company In A Tax Haven"; and this interview was helpful to understand where the papers came from and how the reporting is working.