Nearly 2,000 individuals, entities and addresses with links to India figure in the latest edition of ‘Panama Papers’ giving information on offshore holding of companies in tax havens. A random check of the database for India displays about 22 offshore entities, 1,046 officers or individual links, 42 intermediaries and as many as 828 addresses within the country.
These range from the tony and posh locations of metropolitan cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai to mofussil locations like that in Haryana’s Sirsa, Bihar’s Muzaffarpur, Madhya Pradesh’s Mandsaur and state capital Bhopal and those in North Eastern states.
“The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) publishes today a searchable database that strips away the secrecy of nearly 2,14,000 offshore entities created in 21 jurisdictions, from Nevada to Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands. The data, part of the Panama Papers investigation, is the largest ever release of information about offshore companies and the people behind them. This includes, when available, the names of the real owners of those opaque structures,” the consortium said.
The global body that brought out last month the first edition of the ‘Panama Papers’, by way of secret offshore data sourced from a Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, said the information about a particular country could have “duplicates” as it reiterated that “there are legitimate uses for offshore companies and trusts.” “We do not intend to suggest or imply that any person, company or other entity included in the ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database have broken the law or otherwise acted improperly,” it said.