A massive leak of documents exposes the offshore holdings of 12 current and former world leaders and reveals how associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin secretly shuffled as much as $2 billion through banks and shadow companies.
The leak also provides details of the hidden financial dealings of 128 more politicians and public officials around the world. The cache of 11.5 million records shows how a global industry of law firms and big banks sells financial secrecy to politicians, fraudsters and drug traffickers as well as billionaires, celebrities and sports stars.
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The documents make it clear that major banks are big drivers behind the creation of hard-to-trace companies in the British Virgin Islands, Panama and other offshore havens. The files list nearly 15,600 paper companies that banks set up for clients who want keep their finances under wraps, including thousands created by international giants UBS and HSBC.
Documents from the leaked Mossack Fonseca database showed the relations of three of the seven members of the Communist party’s elite ruling council, the politburo standing committee, had companies that were clients of the offshore law firm. They included relatives of Chinese president Xi Jinping.
A Communist party censorship directive instructed news organisations to purge all reports, blogs, bulletin boards and comments relating to this week’s highly sensitive revelations.
The Portuguese Parliament
has provoked outrage by failing to condemn the long prison sentences handed to the so-called Luanda book club, 17 dissidents convicted of political defiance against Angola’s government.
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Dos Santos, 73, has been president since 1979 and has been accused of presiding over one of the world’s most corrupt governments, amassing a great fortune for himself, his family and friends, while two-thirds of his country lives below the poverty line.
“If Angola was the front office of corruption, Portugal was the back office” [Well... it used to be the front office]
[On Portugal: it had more domestic violence fatalities than all Europe's terrorism victims in the last 10 years]
[Portugal's Siresp rescue network 'failed forest fire victims'] [Although the destruction wrought so far this year does not match the record 426,000 hectares destroyed in 2003, this year's fires have been the deadliest.]
["There are people setting fires, bad people. It is the only explanation that I can see, there is no other," said Maria Conceicao, another resident of Pucarica.] [few months later was Ophelia...]
[A falling tree has killed at least 13 people and injured 49 at a religious ceremony on the Portuguese island of Madeira.]
[While studying in Aveiro (Portugal), Ms. Antunes said, she experienced the pressure herself when she refused to join a hazing ritual that required simulating sexual intercourse, as well as licking yogurt from a boy’s lap. Her mother complained to the university, but no action was taken.]
[The Portuguese court’s decision “ignored the physical and psychological importance of sexuality for women’s self-fulfillment and other dimensions of women’s sexuality”, the European court said.]
[Defense officials in Portugal say they are compiling a list of weapons and ammunition stolen from the national armory in a brazen daytime raid.]
[The Portuguese internal affairs minister said she was concerned about the theft of 50 pistols from the national police premises,]
[Portugal's dark history, or a just a slice of it...]
