April 16, 2024

Athens News

News in English from Greece

Pandora’s Archives: 283 Greek Names To Be Published Mid October

The disclosures in the Pandora’s Archive lists about tax offshores rocked the political world in several countries and showed the real situation in the fight against “black money” and tax evasion in the European Union.

The recent data leak from Pandora does not include the names of active or former politicians, but contains a long list of Greek names.

The names of 283 Greeks are mentioned in the data and are expected to be published in mid-October.

According to Greek media reports (proto THEMA, Capital.gr and others), all 283 are businessmen, mostly lawyers, who are named as dummy owners of offshore companies, thus protecting the data of their clients.

Greece marked in white on the Pandora Papers map, as reported International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

Neighboring Cyprus has suffered much more severely from the Pandora Archives, as leaks alleged that President Nikos Anastasiadis’s law firm was hiding the assets of the Russian oligarch in exile, the British newspaper reported. Guardian.

Anastasiades & Associates, contacted by the Guardian and the BBC, categorically deny providing the broker with false information. The founder of the firm, Nikos Anastasiades, became President of Cyprus in 2013. He said that although he owned shares in a law firm prior to his election, he did not actively participate in its affairs after becoming the leader of the opposition in 1997.

In a statement to the Guardian, Anastasiades said, “I don’t know anything, and I am ready to answer any accusations regarding the conduct of my former law firm.”

On Monday, the authorities and law enforcement agencies of several Western countries at once announced that they would carefully investigate the possible involvement of their citizens in violations of the law in connection with the publication of the Pandora’s Archive – another leak of data on the ultimate beneficiaries of offshore companies studied by journalists in more than 10 jurisdictions around the world.

In a journalist investigation called “Pandora Papers”, there are the names of more than 300 leaders, politicians and high-ranking officials involved in public life in 91 countries and regions, with offshore activities and tax evasion.

The loudest names in the Pandora’s Archive are King Abdullah II of Jordan, who spent over $ 100 million through offshore firms on real estate in the UK and the United States (Abdullah himself in an official statement admitted these purchases, condemning journalists for publishing information that could endanger him and his family); former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (in an official statement, his representatives also rejected suspicions that Blair used offshore for tax evasion when buying real estate); Czech Prime Minister Andrei Babis (in response to an attempt by BBC journalists to ask him about the origin of funds to buy a villa in France, security guard Babis hit one of them); President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelenskyas well as the “regulars” of such leaks – Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his family members, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on British real estate.

According to published Pandora’s Archives The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), 12 million documents that formed the basis of the investigation, were obtained from an unnamed source a year ago. All this time, almost three terabytes of data were studied by journalists from all over the world. And although the size of the Pandora Archive is approximately equal to the Panama Papers, it has an important difference from this and other previous publications: we are talking about a leak not from one source, but about documents from 14 different offshore registrar companies at once. This makes the question of their origin more difficult and practically excludes the version of the hacker attack (which Mossack Fonseka insisted on as an explanation for the Panama Papers leak) or the version of the leaked documents by one employee – as was probably the case with leak documents from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) of the United States Department of the Treasury.





Source link

Verified by MonsterInsights