The Bahama Leaks are 1.3 million internal files from the company register of the

Bahamas The Bahamas (), officially the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, is an island country within the Lucayan Archipelago of the West Indies in the North Atlantic. It takes up 97% of the Lucayan Archipelago's land area and is home to 88% of the ar ...

. After the release of the Panama Papers in 2016, an unknown source handed over internal data from the national corporate registry of the Bahamas to Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer, who analyzed them with the help of the

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Inc. (ICIJ), is an independent global network of 280 investigative journalists and over 140 media organizations spanning more than 100 countries. It is based in Washington, D.C. with ...

(ICIJ). At the same time, ICIJ, Süddeutsche Zeitung and other media partners published detailed reporting before they published an online database of offshore entities. The files provided data on 175,888

shell companies A shell corporation is a company or corporation that exists only on paper and has no office and no employees, but may have a bank account or may hold passive investments or be the registered owner of assets, such as intellectual property, or ...

and trusts that were established in the Bahamas between 1990 and 2016. The 38 gigabytes of data showed that "several current and former heads of state and government and high-ranking politicians, including former EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes; Colombia’s former mining minister Carlos Caballero Argáez;

Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber bin Mohammed bin Thani Al Thani ( ar, حمد بن جاسم بن جبر آل ثاني; born 1959), also known informally by his initials HBJ, is a Qatari politician. He was the Prime Minister of Qatar from 3 April ...

, the former prime minister of Qatar; and Angola’s vice-president,

Manuel Domingos Vicente Manuel Domingos Vicente (born 15 May 1956) is an Angolan politician who served as the vice president of Angola between September 2012 and September 2017. Previously he was chief executive officer of Sonangol, Angola's state oil company, from 199 ...

were respectively are directors, secretaries, or presidents of Bahamian companies". The files were later published as part of a larger set by

Distributed Denial of Secrets Distributed Denial of Secrets, abbreviated DDoSecrets, is a non-profit whistleblower site for news leaks founded in 2018. Sometimes referred to as a successor to WikiLeaks, it is best known for its June 2020 publication of a large collection of ...

. The Bahamas Attorney General accused the group of hacking their corporate registry, though this was disputed by the group, the ICIJ and Frederik Obermaier.

Offshore leaks database

Combined with documents from the Panama Papers and others leaked offshore documents, for the first time a free, online and publicly-searchable database of offshore companies was made available to the public. The Offshore Leaks Database contains information about 500,000 entities linked to 200 countries and territories.

References

{{reflist 2016 in the Bahamas 2016 in economics 2016 scandals News leaks Offshore finance Investigative journalism Tax investigation

Offshore leaks database

See Also

References