Denmark’s tax agency said on Wednesday it has launched 34 court cases seeking damages from management in firms exposed of tax evasion in the Panama Papers.
The Danish government paid $900,000 for access to Panama Papers documents in 2016 to help it identify tax cheat suspects in Denmark.
This month marks the third anniversary of the Panama Papers leak.
In April 2016, the ICIJ announced the leak and a few weeks later released a database that included a subset of the leaked data. The leak itself comprised over 11 million records spanning 40 years from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. At its core, the leak revealed the true ownership of over 200,000 offshore entities, thereby raising a host of tax and political questions regarding many of the entities’ owners.
In the meantime the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) who three years ago originally released the Pulitzer Prize-winning Panama Papers, revealed that first-time gains in Panama, France, and Iceland have pushed above $1.2 billion the global tally of fines and back taxes resulting from the Panama Papers investigation’s exposure of the offshore finance industry.
On the third anniversary of theICIJ-led investigation, the fallout from it is gathering pace through hundreds of separate investigations into undisclosed wealth across scores of nations.
In Panama, authorities have clawed back more than $14 million in the past three years.
Since June 2018, the United Kingdom alone has added $119 million to bring its total to more than $252 million; Australia has collected another $43 million to eclipse $92 million, and Belgium has added an extra $6.5 million to its government coffers to surpass $18 million.
French tax authorities have confirmed nearly $136 million has now been recovered – and that figure is expected to rise. They have carried out more than 500 inspections since April 2016.
Canada’s Revenue Agency, which also raided two properties last week in connection to the investigation, has revealed it should recoup more than $11 million in federal taxes and fines from 66 audits. The agency said it planned to audit about 234 more taxpayers linked to the probe. Fewer than 10 criminal investigations are ongoing.
And in Panama, authorities have clawed back more than $14 million in the past three years.
Investigations are continuing in numerous countries including Austria (where regulators are examining whether two major banks followed procedures to prevent money laundering), Germany, France, and Norway.
ICIJ, together with the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and more than 100 other media partners, spent more than a year sifting through 11.5 million leaked files to expose offshore holdings.
These countries have either publicly announced they recouped money from the Panama Papers, or have reported the amount to ICIJ’s media partners and are included in ICIJ’s $1.2 billion figure:
Australia – $92,880,415
Austria – $2,725,869
Belgium – $18,749,009
Colombia – $88,884,000
Czech Republic – $36,462,741
Denmark – $47,500,000
Ecuador – $84,300,000
France – $135,696,000
Germany – $183,193,536
Iceland – $25,525,959
Lithuania – $358,830
Luxembourg – $2,393,837
Malta – $10,706,938
Mexico – $21,568,200
Netherlands – $8,283,390
New Zealand – $410,400
Panama – $14,132,128
Slovenia – $1,000,000
Spain – $164,104,468
Sweden – $19,295,056
UK – $252,762,000
Uruguay – $1,000,000
