The inside story of how the Offshore Leaks Database became a go-to resource on offshore finance

When the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists launched the Offshore Leaks Database in 2013, it received 2 million page views in the first 24 hours and crashed — an unmistakable sign of the public’s demand for information about the secret system known as offshore finance.

Nearly a decade and millions of leaked documents later, the database has quietly become one of the most valuable resources on the offshore financial system. Every month, regulators, academics, reporters and the public rack up 300,000 pageviews tracking the hidden wealth of drug dealers, human traffickers and corrupt oligarchs — not to mention the diverted profits of brand name multinationals.

Now, the Offshore Leaks Database has become the focal point of renewed interest with a bump in traffic as governments scramble to track down and seize the offshore assets of Russian oligarchs and the enablers of President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine who have snuck stolen wealth into the luxury of the West.

After steadily expanding the database since 2013 with information from 2016’s Panama Papers project and four other leaks, ICIJ today releases the last batch of data, which includes new data on more than 9,000 offshore companies, foundations and trusts, from the Pandora Papers, the massive leak from 14 so-called offshore service providers that powered last year’s largest-ever journalism collaboration of the same name. As we close the final chapter of the Pandora Papers in the Offshore Leaks Database, we share what it took to bring it to life — and why it has become an essential tool in the global fight to dismantle offshore secrecy.
Hard drive in the mail

It all started with a guy in Perth, Australia, who claimed to have invented a magic pill. This pill, once dropped into a car’s fuel tank, would miraculously eliminate toxic emissions and dramatically improve gas mileage. The pill took Australia by storm, racking up $60 million from investors.
ICIJ director Gerard Ryle
ICIJ director Gerard Ryle

Gerard Ryle, however, was … skeptical. The 41-year-old investigations editor at the Sydney Morning Herald began digging into the entrepreneur behind the pill, a certain Tim Johnston who managed to dupe investors for three years. The pill, Ryle revealed, was a massive Ponzi scheme. But what he also discovered was that Johnston had set up multiple companies in the British Virgin Islands, a notorious tax haven. These entities had issued the millions of shares that had been sold to the deep-pocketed sports stars, politicians and others who had wanted in on his invention. For Ryle, the revelation cracked the lid on a bigger story, a secret world of offshore finance.

A tax haven is a place with low or no taxes where a foreigner can register a company anonymously, under the name of a stand-in often for no other purpose than to own a bank account used to divert profits or hide wealth. Offshore service providers, usually based in the havens, specialize in incorporating and managing the paperwork of such entities, which are often used to hide assets from tax and other authorities.

In 2009, Ryle published a book detailing his investigation into the fraudster Johnston and the offshore companies he had set up for his magic pill venture. The book would trigger a career-defining event: a reader with inside details not only on Johnston’s companies but other offshore entities mailed Ryle a hard drive containing 2.5 million documents from two offshore financial service providers.

The data-packed hard drive — in gigabytes, the equivalent of streaming films on Netflix for nearly 11 days straight — contained 2 million emails with details on more than 122,000 offshore companies and trusts. At the time, it was the largest leak of its kind in history.

“That disk was really the basis of the Offshore Leaks Database,” Ryle said.
An idea from Costa Rica

In 2011, Ryle, packed his hard drive and punched a ticket to Washington, D.C., where he had accepted a new role as director of ICIJ, an organization designed to bring together reporters from across the globe to conduct cross-border investigations. Housed in the basement offices at the Center for Public Integrity and with just three full-time staffers, ICIJ had produced creditable investigations into tobacco smuggling and the U.S. AIDS policy abroad — but nothing like what would come next.

Two years later, an ICIJ-led global collaboration of journalists from nearly 40 news organizations and 46 countries would use the hard drive’s leaked records to produce an investigation formally called Secrecy for Sale but known internally as Offshore Leaks.

The probe was a journalistic landmark, expanding ICIJ’s cross-border collaboration model to a topic that was ripe for it: the largely unexplored network of island tax havens, global banks and Western professionals that make up the offshore financial system.

Giannina Segnini, founder and director of the data-investigative team at La Nación, an ICIJ media partner, first proposed to make the leaked offshore data somehow accessible to the public. Segnini had helped assemble an investigative team that included data analysts, developers and geographic information systems specialists, giving La Nación deep experience in pooling together information into massive databases.

At the time, WikiLeaks was commanding global attention with its new model centered on publishing huge caches of leaked data virtually in raw form, most famously, top-secret diplomatic cables from the U.S. State Department. Wikileaks drew plaudits for allowing the public into the journalistic process and harsh criticism for endangering national security and releasing sensitive personal information about non-public figures.

The idea was not to release the data WikiLeaks-style, but to include only essential information, like the names and locations of the offshore companies and their owners, and add interactive features that would allow users to easily draw connections. The new application would be verified, structured into standardized fields, and easily searchable.

Still, Ryle was hesitant. The technical challenges alone were enormous. And, as an Irish-raised longtime resident of Australia, where libel protections are relatively weak, he feared the legal risks could sink the tiny news organization.

“I was thinking, ‘If this was Australia, every single one of these people would potentially sue us,’” Ryle said.

But ICIJ had three things on its side: the data, because it came directly from the offshore service providers, was undoubtedly accurate; ICIJ’s decision not to publish in the database personal information like bank account numbers or financial statements; and perhaps most importantly, ICIJ enjoyed the protections of U.S. law, which provides ample leeway for the publication of truthful information that is newsworthy. ICIJ’s lawyer, Mike Rothberg, gave the thumbs up.

So Ryle sent Segnini’s team a copy of the hard drive and, after a minor holdup in customs, it landed in the laps of La Nación’s data experts.
Technical challenges

The material on Ryle’s disk came in a jumble of formats: PDFs, spreadsheets, images and web files. It also contained more than 320 spreadsheets from the two offshore service providers, Portcullis TrustNet (now Portcullis) of Singapore and the British Virgin Island’s Commonwealth Trust Limited. Each spreadsheet was composed of different sets of related records — one included the names of officers, for instance, while another one the names of companies. Without an index to explain the relationships between the spreadsheets, Segnini’s team would have to reverse-engineer them, a painstaking technical and analytical task.

Rigoberto Carvajal, a member of Segnini’s team in 2013, recalls that a few colleagues around the world expressed doubts that he and the Costa Rican team could pull it off.
Data gurus Rigoberto Carvajal, Matthew Caruana Galizia, Giannina Segnini and Mar Cabra

“During the process, I felt like [people were thinking] ‘This guy from Costa Rica, how can this guy do this work?’” he told ICIJ with a chuckle. But he pushed those doubts aside. “With this project, I had the opportunity to contribute to fight corruption. That was the exciting part,” he said.

Carvajal and the rest of the La Nación team proved the doubters wrong when, in the summer of 2013, they quietly launched the web-based offshore database, with advice from U.K. journalist Duncan Campbell and programmer Matthew Fowler, as well as Mar Cabra, who later became the head of ICIJ’s first data team. It was searchable, verified, open to the public, and free.

Using a JavaScript library, or pre-written code, called Sigma, the application allowed users to easily visualize and interact with the huge trove of ownership information. Users simply had to search a keyword, company name, person’s name or jurisdiction to find all associated entities, including intermediaries, offshore providers and more. For example, it included details about individuals and companies linked to a tax fraud scandal that led to a ban on Americans adopting Russian orphans, about a Venezuelan deal-maker who funneled millions of dollars in bribes to a Venezuelan government official, and more.

Maybe best of all, it allowed journalists around the world who weren’t involved in the initial Offshore Leaks investigation to follow new, unexplored leads.

And that would happen a lot. Over the next several years, ICIJ would obtain new leaks from an expanding number of offshore service providers: the Panama Papers in 2016, featuring a massive leak from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca; the Bahama Leaks, also in 2016, based on internal documents from the island nation’s corporate registry; the Paradise Papers in 2017, containing documents from the Bermuda-based law firm Appleby and Singapore-based company Asiaciti Trust; and the Pandora Papers in 2021, which revealed new details on companies from a whopping 14 offshore service providers around the world.