Five years later i Panama Papers, L’Espresso publishes exclusively for Italy i Pandora Papers, the outcome of a new global investigation of theInternational Consortium of Investigative Journalists (Icij), with over 600 journalists from 150 international newspapers: more than 11.9 million documents with the names of over 29,000 beneficiaries of offshore companies, unknown until yesterday. “Behind the papers in the name of the trustees, foreign investments and assets of European and South American politicians, African dictators, Asian ministers, Arab sheikhs. The secret safes of 46 Russian oligarchs. The offshore companies that zero taxes on a super caste of over 130 American, Indian, Mexican and other multi-billionaires“, it is read.
According to the revelations, 35 heads of state and government, 300 politicians from 90 countries, generals, heads of secret services, public and private managers, bankers, industrialists and public figures are involved. Among them, we read, the King of Jordan Abdullah II, which “bought villas and land in the United States and London, for over 100 million euros, through personal offshore, while his government received billions from the United States to fight terrorism and avoid an Arab revolution in an allied country”. In Europe, the Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis with a British Virgin Islands screen company to buy a $ 22 million villa on the Cote d’Azur, which he would never declare in his country, and the Dutch Minister of Economy Wopke Hoekstra, who would be anonymous shareholder of an offshore company, never declared. The former British premier is also in the files Tony Blair, who together with his wife would have saved several thousand euros in stamp duties when they bought an office in London.
Again, the Ukrainian head of state Volodimyr Zelensky, who would have secretly owned a medium-sized company through an offshore company for years before divesting it. In Russia, Svetlana Krivonogikh, referred to in the media as the mother of an unrecognized daughter of the president Vladimir Putin, would have been “the beneficiary of an offshore company established in 2003, exactly one month after the birth of the child, which bought a residence overlooking the sea in the Principality of Monaco for 3 million and 600 thousand dollars. A deal managed by the same trustees who they still work for the oligarchs closest to President Putin. At the time of the alleged flirtation Svetlana worked as a cleaner in a hotel. Today she has a personal fortune of over 100 million “, reads L’Espresso.
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