The jurisdictions that help kleptocrats live in luxury on stolen assets must stop shielding corrupt elites
Seven years ago, an anonymous source who went by the name “John Doe” provided us with the data that became the Panama Papers – 2.6 terabytes of leaked documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. The leak turned out to have quite an impressive Russian component. We found shell companies connected to Vladimir Putin’s judo friends, Boris and Arkady Rotenberg, to the oligarch Alisher Usmanov and the wife of the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. But, most significantly, we stumbled across Sergej Roldugin, a professional cellist and godfather of Putin’s eldest daughter, who had a central role in a network of secret offshore deals and vast loans worth $2bn, described at the time as the key to tracing Putin’s hidden fortune.
All this hidden wealth mattered when we published the Panama Papers in 2016, two years after Russia had annexed the Crimean peninsula. Now, after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it matters more than ever. Lawmakers in the UK, the EU, the US and Canada have sanctioned Russian banks, Russian companies and individuals close to Putin. This includes Russian oligarchs, as well as Putin’s friends, supporters and admirers who have helped facilitate his kleptocracy by hiding his wealth in accounts under their own names or just championing his kleptocracy for their own illicit enrichment. Individuals like the cellist Sergej Roldugin, the Rotenberg brothers and Usmanov.
Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer are investigative journalists with the German paper Süddeutsche Zeitung. They initiated the 2016 Panama Papers as well as 2017 Paradise Papers revelations and the 2022 Suisse Secrets. Obermaier is co-founder of the Anti-Corruption Data Collective (https://acdatacollective.org), Obermayer on the board of Forbidden Stories (https://forbiddenstories.org).