The Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca is not exactly well-known outside the rich and powerful, but because of a recent massive data leak to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), it's safe to assume that it's about to become famous across the globe, albeit for the wrong reasons.
Now dubbed as the Panama Papers, the incident involves 2.6 TB worth of information, revealing that more than 140 political figures from 55 different countries are part of the fiasco. Basically, the report shows how they hide their wealth.
Noteworthy persons include former Egypt president Hosni Mubarak, Syrian President Bashar Assad, former Libya leader Muammar Gaddafi, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the British Prime Minister David Cameron's father, Ian Cameron, to name a few. Fusion has a broader list of the people involved.
How To Use The ICIJ Database
Users can head on over to the ICIJ website to do a search with the option to filter their queries by country.
To make the searches more efficient, the organization has a compilation of useful hints, ranging from usage of double quotations and plus sign to the tilde sign and asterisk.
Another option to comb through the database is to download a copy of it in CSV format. Now, users will have to extract the downloaded .ZIP file, and for Mac users, they only have to double click on it to do so.
As for Windows users, they will have to right click on it and select Extract All and choose a location to export the files to. In the folder destination, it should have four files: the nodes.csv, the edges_1direction.csv, node_countries.csv and countries.csv.
A Closer Look
ICIJ also published a video tutorial back in October 2013 to let users make the most out of the database.
Meanwhile, ProductHunt also joined the whole kerfuffle, producing a Panama Papers map.
It should be noted that everyone who uses offshore structures isn't automatically a criminal, as some use them for perfectly legitimate reasons. Once that the leaked database has been sifted through, the good and the bad will finally be distinguishable.
