Bhubaneswar: Sachin Tendulkar, Anil Ambani, Nirav Modi’s sister, and Kiran Mazumdar Shaw are among the 300 Indians named in the Pandora Papers, an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) uncovering financial secrets of high-profile individuals around the world
The ‘Pandora Papers’ investigation was carried on by around 600 journalists from 150 media outlets in 117 countries. It looks into some 12 million documents from 14 different financial services companies from across the world.
According to an Indian Express report, businessman Anil Ambani has 18 asset holding offshore companies despite declaring bankruptcy in a British court. Fugitive Nirav Modi’s sister set up a trust just a month before the tainted diamantaire fled India.
Biocon promoter Kiran Mazumdar Shaw’s husband set up a trust with keys to a person who has been banned by the SEBI for insider trading, while Sachin Tendulkar is one among several Indians who opted for a reorganisation of their assets after the ICJ leak dubbed ‘Panama Papers’ in 2016.
As per an investigation of records of Alcogal, Panama law firm which are part of Pandora Papers, Sachin, with his wife Anjali Tendulkar and father-in-law Anand Mehta, were named as Beneficial Owners (BOs) and Directors of a British Virgin Islands (BVI)-based company: Saas International Limited. The company was liquidated in July 2016, said Indian Express in its report.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists obtained the trove of more than 11.9 million confidential files and led a team of more than 600 journalists from 150 news outlets that spent two years sifting through them, tracking down hard-to-find sources and digging into court records and other public documents from dozens of countries.
The leaked records come from 14 offshore services firms from around the world that set up shell companies and other offshore nooks for clients often seeking to keep their financial activities in the shadows. The records include information about the dealings of nearly three times as many current and former country leaders as any previous leak of documents from offshore havens.
The Pandora Papers investigation is larger and more global than even ICIJ’s landmark Panama Papers, which rocked the world in 2016, spawning police raids and new laws in dozens of countries and the fall of prime ministers in Iceland and Pakistan.
The Panama Papers came from the files of a single offshore services provider — the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. The Pandora Papers shine a light on a far wider cross-section of the lawyers and middlemen who are at the heart of the offshore industry.
The Pandora Papers provide more than twice as much information about the ownership of offshore companies. In all, the new leak of documents reveals the real owners of more than 29,000 offshore companies. The owners come from more than 200 countries and territories, with the largest contingents from Russia, the UK, Argentina and China.