The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich & Powerful Hide Their Money Book Review

The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich & Powerful Hide Their Money is the ground-breaking investigation into legal and illegal offshore accounts held by politicians, dictators, celebrities, business owners, and drug dealers whom ultimately wanted to hide copious amounts of clean and dirty money from authorities across the globe for various reasons such as tax evasion and money laundering.

The book, written by the journalists whom initially received massive amounts of data from an anonymous source, presumably whom worked at Mossack Fonseca, Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier are respected journalists from Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung. During 2015, journalists from hundreds of countries across the globe, co-operated and collaborated together to research approximately 2.6 terabytes worth of data received from an anonymous source through the organisation, The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. This made complete sense because the scandal involved thousands of people from different countries across the globe.

The Panama Papers reads like a fictional crime thriller, you are waiting to see what happens next. The thirty chapters document the process of how they researched through the abundant supply of terrifyingly large quantities of data at their disposal, almost like a personal diary. But also contains and documents key findings of the research such as the important people involved in this corrupted scheme to avoid paying vital tax. It’s almost impossible to comprehend the entire scale to where this leads. You have questions about Russia’s current president Vladimir Putin’s involvement with large scales of money. Iceland’s current leader at the time of revelation, resigned as a result of his involvement in an offshore shell company.

If you read the newspapers on the 3rd April 2016, and the read the front cover, you need to read this book to gain further information about The Panama Papers. Of course, if you didn’t read the newspapers that day, you should definitely read the book anyway to see how these corrupt official hide money in deceiving ways.