Data Leak Exposes Methods
January 22, 2020
The cat is out of the Hermes handbag. Raw Story reports, “Massive Leak of Data Reveals New Money-Hiding Secrets of Superrich—and this in ‘Only the Beginning’.” Last summer, the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets leaked data from the Formations House, a British company that serves the well-to-do around the world. It has taken journalists some time to analyze the roughly 100 GB of data, dubbed “#29Leaks,” and now news stories are cropping up. They say the company has been creating legal entities as fronts for money laundering, tax evasion, and fraud. We learn:
“According to Unicorn Riot, reporting from the data will have an international scope: Formations House has been the subject of international scrutiny for years, and the #29Leaks documents have been under investigation for some time. It is expected that news stories in Central America, Africa and Europe will examine information drawn from this set of leaks. The use of Formations House-managed companies to move money around between offshore and private banking centers like Luxembourg and other parts of the world is among the main themes of this dataset. Other documents expected to be covered in detail show how the African nation of The Gambia is commonly used to create banks and insurance companies on paper for wealthy people in other continents, which Formations House and related parties package and facilitate. On Tuesday The Times of London showed, via undercover reporting, how Formations House sets up shell companies for its clients. McClatchy reported on how Formations House helped Iran’s national oil company avoid sanctions. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project detailed schemes across Eastern Europe. The Economic Times, meanwhile, dug into the company’s Pakistani-British management.”
The Pursuance Project, which has been helping make sense of the leaked information, expects reporting will continue to emerge. In fact, they say, they are only beginning to analyze all the data available from this trove.
Cynthia Murrell, January 22, 2020
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