A decade ago, the biggest journalism network ever assembled set out to investigate a system built to stay hidden.

What they uncovered became the Panama Papers, a sweeping investigation that broke open the secretive world of finance and exposed how the rich and powerful use offshore structures to protect wealth and dodge scrutiny.

This is part two in a three-part series that explores how it all came together, drawing on the recollections of the journalists whose reporting sparked a global reckoning over financial secrecy and its consequences. Read part one here.

The rabbit hole

Anuška Delić (Slovenia)
Then: Investigative reporter, Delo | Now: Founder and editor-in-chief, Oštro

At her desk in Delo’s open newsroom, Anuska Delić kept her back to the window and her work to herself.

An old-school reporter, she routinely printed documents and read them with a pen in hand and Post-its close by. But the Panama Papers weren’t something you printed — not if you were trying to keep to the secrecy rules that held together a massive journalistic collaboration.

When Delić opened the database for the first time, she did what every reporter on the project did. She searched home.

“Slovenia.”

The database returned about 4,000 hits – manageable, compared to the thousands that swamped reporters from bigger countries. She realized quickly that she could probably examine every reference.

What she didn’t know yet was that she was pregnant.

She had been invited to join the project in early summer 2015. Two weeks later, she learned she was expecting a child. Her son would be born the following March, two weeks before publication.

“It was a crazy time,” remembers Delić, who now leads Oštro, an Adriatic investigative journalism center she founded after leaving Delo.

Before it was called the Panama Papers, the investigation was known by a codename — Project Prometheus. Image: Kristof Clerix

On one side of her life was the biggest investigation she would ever work on. On the other, the realities of pregnancy — exhaustion, medical checkups and the constant awareness that a new life was growing.

At first, the database research felt exhilarating.

“It was like Alice in Wonderland — going down the rabbit hole,” she said.

The files were messy. Attachments sometimes mattered and sometimes didn’t. In the beginning, she opened everything, trying to understand how the system worked.

“Almost everything I saw was like, ‘Oh! What is this? What could this be?” she said.

Then one day, the project took a turn into new, unexpected territory.

A name jumped out: Dejan Zavec. The renowned boxer – also known as Jan Zaveck and Mister Simpatikus — had grown up poor and become one of Slovenia’s most admired athletes. And now Delić saw he had established an offshore offshore company in Anguilla.

These weren’t just distant oligarchs or anonymous businessmen.

“Of all people, I had to find the darling of the public,” Delić said. “That was the end of the honeymoon phase for me.”

She began the slow work of figuring out what Zavec’s company did and why it existed.

“Just finding someone in the documents isn’t enough,” Delić said. “Just because people would be interested doesn’t make it public interest.”

She learned that Zavec had established a company, ABC Agency, in Anguilla. The company took over his Slovenian firm, Boksing, which held the real estate for his gym, allowing assets to be moved through a tax haven before ultimately being transferred to another company he controlled.

Zavec initially denied owning ABC but later he acknowledged that he had founded it and had not reported it to tax authorities.

Just because people would be interested doesn’t make it public interest.

By then, the scale of the project had become clear. Hundreds of reporters around the world were digging through the same trove of records, chasing threads across borders, time zones and languages.

At night, the baby had a habit of hiccuping in utero — not briefly, but for stretches that could last more than an hour, keeping Delić awake at odd hours.

Sleep was impossible.

“So you know what I did?” she said.

“I looked through Panama Papers.”

https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/ten-years-after-the-panama-papers-enablers-and-tax-cheats-are-still-being-brought-to-justice/

IMPACT Ten years after the Panama Papers, enablers and tax cheats are still being brought to justice Apr 02, 2026

https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/the-story-that-rocked-the-world-ten-years-of-the-panama-papers-part-1/

BEHIND THE SCENES The story that rocked the world: Ten years of the Panama Papers, part 1 Mar 31, 2026

https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/pop-culture-panama-papers-music/

IMPACT How the Panama Papers rocked pop culture Apr 03, 2023

Recommended reading IMPACT Ten years after the Panama Papers, enablers and tax cheats are still being brought to justice Apr 02, 2026 BEHIND THE SCENES The story that rocked the world: Ten years of the Panama Papers, part 1 Mar 31, 2026 IMPACT How the Panama Papers rocked pop culture Apr 03, 2023

to  money laundering.

“He was telling me directly to my face that such a behavior would be completely illegal,” Obermaier recalled. “And for me, I’m not a good actor, so it was really hard to not say ‘I know that it is you who has done exactly that.’”

The moment landed like a jolt: the system calling itself illegal.

The second encounter was miles away in every sense.

Obermaier had seen the name Leticia Montoya more times than he could count. She was named as a director of thousands of companies that surfaced in the leaked documents.

Following the paper trail led Obermaier to a tiny house in an impoverished neighborhood with rubbish burning in the streets.

Montoya wasn’t home when he visited, but he briefly spoke to her later by phone.

No, she didn’t know what the companies did or who owned them. She told Obermaier to direct his queries to the registered agent — Mossack Fonseca. Then she hung up.

In Panama, the paper trail suddenly felt unmistakably human.

Mossack Fonseca’s Panama City headquarters, to the right. Image: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Messages in the night

Ritu Sarin (India)
Executive editor (news and investigations), The Indian Express

It was late and Ritu Sarin had finally gone to bed.

After eight months of logging documents and scanning files alongside two colleagues, the Indian Express’s senior editor was tired.

“There was no Saturday and Sunday,” she recalled. “Morning to night in the office for Panama Papers for months.”

Moments in between were filled with text message exchanges with P. Vaidyanathan Iyer and Jay Mazoomdaar, teammates pursuing their own leads in the data.

That night, just a few days before the agreed-to publication date, the work followed her home, as it often did. She remembered something she’d seen earlier that day on I-Hub,  the digital newsroom ICIJ created so journalists could share information securely.

“Things were rolling very fast and the momentum had built up,” Sarin said.

Indian Express investigative reporters P Vaidyanathan Iyer, Ritu Sarin, Jay Mazoomdaar at work in India. Image: Indian Express

With 370 collaborators across multiple time zones and publication day approaching, messages had been streaming in faster than journalists could read them, 24 hours a day. Sarin tried to keep up, but it was impossible.

Hours earlier, Umar Cheema, an ICIJ member a thousand miles away in Pakistan, had flagged the name Aishwarya Rai.

“I had gone to sleep,” Sarin said. “And suddenly it struck me — hey, there was a message about an Indian actress.”

Indian Express editors already had more stories planned than they could reasonably launch on Day One of the project — and even those would be squeezed if India’s cricket team made it to the T20 World Cup final. Win or lose, in a country where cricket is king, the match would dominate the front page.

A single document was like a treasure trove where there were attachments inside attachments.

Sarin immediately went back to I-Hub, opened the dataset and began following the trail.

An old-school reporter who prefers paper, Sarin started printing. The stacks on her bookshelf grew, spilling out of plastic folders she struggled to keep organized. Documents had a way of multiplying.

“A single document was like a treasure trove where there were attachments inside attachments,” she said.

As the pages piled up, Sarin started connecting the dots. The records pointed to Rai’s role as a director of Amic Partners, an offshore company Mossack Fonseca created in the British Virgin Islands.

(Rai’s media adviser at the time called the information “totally untrue and false,” but Indian authorities would later open a civil investigation into her financial affairs.)

The calendar was unforgiving. Publication was days away and Sarin’s team was still gathering comments from other figures named in their reporting — Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and some of India’s most powerful business leaders.

“Here was another very important story,” Sarin said. “It was very evident it’s going to make it to page one on Day One, and it did.”

sizes="auto, (max-width: 760px) 100vw, 760px" /> Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and his friend and cellist Sergei Roldugin at a meeting in 2016. Roldugin was one of a number of members of Putin’s inner circle named in the Panama Papers.

Image: Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images

In Washington or London, those kinds of letters were standard. Not in Moscow.

Russia was a place where journalists who crossed powerful interests could lose more than access. Partners there were worried. For safety, they wanted to be out of the country when Putin saw the letter and when publication day came, and they needed time to make arrangements.

Normally, ICIJ allows several weeks for responses but with grave security concerns , the usual timeline got compressed. Putin’s letter was sent just a week before publication.

The response was swift – and unexpectedly public.

The Kremlin called a press conference, accusing ICIJ of preparing an “information attack” aimed at disrupting upcoming elections.

This was the first time the upcoming investigation had been mentioned publicly. The secrecy that held together 376 journalists had been pierced.

“That sent panic through everybody,” Ryle said.

But as the day unfolded, something else became clear.

The Kremlin meant it as a preemptive strike: discredit the messenger before the news landed. Instead, the very act meant to discredit the project signaled that it mattered. And now the world was waiting for it.

“It really began to build interest in what we were about to do,” Ryle said.

The Kremlin had tried to cast the project as a targeted political assault. Instead, it confirmed that the story was big enough to rattle power.

But the Panama Papers was never just a Russian story, and Putin wasn’t the only world leader about to face global scrutiny.

This is part two of a three-part series; read part one here. Check back next week for the final installment, and subscribe to ICIJ’s newsletter to receive news updates direct to your inbox.

In a court in Cologne, Germany, a former law firm executive sat and listened as his lawyers read out a statement.

“In the end, I accept the consequences,” his lawyers told the courtroom on his behalf at the March hearing.

For Christoph Zollinger, a dual Swiss-Panamanian citizen and former partner at Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca now facing charges of facilitating tax evasion, those consequences have been more than 10 years in the making.

Zollinger’s alleged crimes were revealed by the landmark Panama Papers investigation, and the trial in Cologne has been hailed as a testament to the project’s long reach and the long arm of justice.

In 2016, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and more than 100 media partners published hundreds of stories based on a trove of more than 11.5 million confidential documents from Mossack Fonseca. The Panama Papers were hailed as an unprecedented journalistic project that put tax evasion on the global public agenda.

The investigation contributed to the downfall of political leaders in Iceland, Pakistan and beyond, and sparked arrests, new laws and government probes in dozens of countries across the globe. It exposed an international web of offshore shell companies created for wealthy clients, including star athletes, top business executives and heads of state.

It exposed the magnitude of what was going on. It was mind-blowing. — economist Joseph Stiglitz

The exposé was honored with multiple journalism awards, including a Pulitzer Prize; ICIJ was named second on a list of the world’s biggest tax influencers for 2016; and the “Panama Papers” was mentioned hundreds of thousands of times in media reports in more than 190 countries.

In the decade since, the Panama Papers has cemented its place as a watershed moment in a global push towards greater transparency — and in public and political conversations around tax, secrecy and inequality.

“It exposed the magnitude of what was going on,” economist Joseph Stiglitz told ICIJ. “It was mind-blowing. And it exposed the fact that it wasn’t just the most nefarious individuals in, you might say, poorly governed countries, but senior officials in countries like Iceland and the U.K.”

A slow march to justice

Although Zollinger left Mossack Fonseca years before journalists published the Panama Papers, leaked records showed he was involved in some of the law firm’s most controversial decisions, including its work for sanctioned Syrian businessman Rami Makhlouf. German investigators issued an international arrest warrant for Zollinger in 2020, which was suspended in 2024 when he came forward to face trial.

German authorities have alleged that Zollinger was “a member of a group of companies” that helped clients from around the world “set up so-called ‘offshore companies’ based in Panama or other countries known as ‘tax havens.’ ” If convicted, he faces up to seven and a half years in prison.

Prosecutors have linked Zollinger to a tax loss of about 13 million euros, or roughly $15 million, tied to 50 offshore companies.

In a statement read by his lawyer to the court, Zollinger denied founding a criminal organization but admitted to aiding and abetting tax evasion.

Christoph Zollinger sits between his lawyers in a courtroom in Cologne at the start of the Panama Papers trial.

Frederik Obermaier, one of the two journalists who received the original Panama Papers leak and now co-founder and co-director of Paper Trail Media, attended the first day of the trial in Cologne, and said it showed how long law enforcement efforts can take as prosecutors tackle complex cases spanning multiple countries.

But, Obermaier said, it should also serve as a reminder that those who engage in corruption shouldn’t feel at ease.

“If you are working for another law firm, doing something similar, you should be well aware that this could be your destiny in the future,” he said. “Sitting in front of a trial of a court, and having to explain what you have done.”

Several notable figures at the center of the controversy have faced legal consequences or a public reckoning. Mossack Fonseca shuttered its doors within months of the publication. Iceland’s prime minister, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, resigned following nationwide protests after revelations that he and his wife owned a company in the British Virgin Islands.

In 2017, Pakistan’s Supreme Court removed from office the country’s longest-serving prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, as a result of the Panama Papers’ revelations about his family’s properties overseas. A year later, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison on corruption charges and fined $10.6 million. Politicians in Mongolia, Spain and beyond also fell.

Protests outside Iceland’s Parliament in Reykjavik the day after the Panama Papers revelations were published. Image: Jóhannes Kr. Kristjánsson / Reykjavik Media

Over $1.3B in taxes recouped

Even 10 years after the Panama Papers, updates about the investigation can still command the public’s attention.

Earlier this year, when The Indian Express received a response to its public information request about the government’s investigation into the Panama Papers, Pandora Papers and other financial investigations, the news was big enough to make the newspaper’s front page.

The Indian Express print front page, featuring a Panama Papers-related update 10 years after the original investigation. Image: The Indian Express

“I-T brings Rs 14,601-crore undisclosed offshore investments to tax,” read the headline. The huge figure includes 13,800 crore rupees — or about $1.4 billion — linked to the Panama Papers.

Those numbers represent the totals that have been identified in tax cases and the dispatch of tax notices, said Ritu Sarin, an ICIJ member and executive editor of news and investigations for The Indian Express. While the sums are yet to be collected, it’s a step towards prosecution and penalty under Indian law.

Like the Zollinger case in Germany, true justice is years in the making.

“[In] Indian courts, things move slowly,” Sarin said. “Investigations take a long time.”

In earlier responses to Indian Express information requests, tax authorities said they filed 46 criminal prosecution complaints and had conducted searches, seizures and surveys as part of 84 Panama Papers-related cases.

Indian authorities aren’t the only ones engaging in a continuous crawl to recoup funds identified in the Panama Papers. ICIJ’s data team estimates at least $1.3 billion have been recouped by authorities internationally that can be directly attributed to the investigation — a number that is likely an undercount, since tallying recouped money is difficult and many countries don’t report the sum collected.

But according to ICIJ’s analysis and information requests, several countries around the world, from Sweden to Belgium to New Zealand to Spain, all recovered figures in the millions. The total may yet rise — as in India, several countries are still engaged in lengthy legal processes.

The investigation marked a turning point for tax departments and regulatory efforts around the world.

“We have learned a lot from the Panama leak and we use that knowledge in our work with new leaks,” a program manager at the Swedish Tax Agency told SVT in 2025. “We have gained better insight into international tax evasion and the central role of different types of enablers.”

me 0.1% holds approximately 80% of all untaxed offshore wealth.

But Oxfam also noted that while offshore wealth has increased since the publication of the Panama Papers, the proportion going untaxed has declined substantially, a shift that researchers attribute to progress in information-sharing programs between countries.

“The results, if you just look at policy changes in the last 10 years, have been remarkable,” said Gary Kalman, executive director of Transparency International U.S.

https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/the-story-that-rocked-the-world-ten-years-of-the-panama-papers-part-1/

BEHIND THE SCENES The story that rocked the world: Ten years of the Panama Papers, part 1 Mar 31, 2026

https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/hundreds-of-millions-more-dollars-recouped-by-governments-after-icij-investigations/

IMPACT Hundreds of millions more dollars recouped by governments after ICIJ investigations Apr 03, 2025

https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/police-operation-targeting-brazils-largest-criminal-organization-uncovers-panama-papers-link/

IMPACT Police operation targeting Brazil’s largest criminal organization uncovers Panama Papers link Oct 15, 2024

Recommended reading BEHIND THE SCENES The story that rocked the world: Ten years of the Panama Papers, part 1 Mar 31, 2026 IMPACT Hundreds of millions more dollars recouped by governments after ICIJ investigations Apr 03, 2025 IMPACT Police operation targeting Brazil’s largest criminal organization uncovers Panama Papers link Oct 15, 2024

ntary by actor and filmmaker Alex Winter, “The Panama Papers,” which told the story of the journalists behind the scenes.

In the days, months and years since the investigation’s launch, it garnered multiple mentions on late-night TV like “The Daily Show” and “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” cartoons in newspapers and magazines like The New Yorker, and even questions on quiz shows like “Jeopardy!” and National Public Radio’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.” It also inspired musicians — at least five musical groups, 11 record albums, and at least 38 songs have since been named after the investigation.

People haven’t blanked out. No, they remember the Panama Papers. — investigative journalist Ritu Sarin

To this day, the investigation’s impact on the public consciousness still lingers; Sarin remembers traveling home from an ICIJ board meeting in Washington, D.C., a couple years ago, and striking up a conversation with a train conductor who immediately recognized the project.

“Of course, you know, as time passes, things fade,” Sarin said. “But people haven’t blanked out. No, they remember the Panama Papers.”

And as global inequality intensifies, ideas in the public consciousness around inequality, tax and transparency seeded by the Panama Papers have continued to dominate political conversations.

“Now, saying we should tax the rich has become quite mainstream,” Ryding said. “That’s also an important message from the Panama Papers: that there is no lack of money in the world. It’s just that when it comes to funding the public budgets, suddenly, there are some people that pay their taxes and there are the people that don’t.”

A decade ago, the biggest network for journalists ever assembled set out to investigate a system built to stay hidden.

What they uncovered became the Panama Papers, a sweeping investigation that broke open the secretive world of finance and exposed how the rich and powerful use offshore structures to protect wealth and dodge scrutiny.

The global project broke the model for investigative journalism. It built on years of pioneering collaborative projects by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and exploded into the mainstream as the best new way for journalists to take on systems that no single newsroom could unravel alone.

This series explores how it all came together, drawing on the recollections of the journalists whose reporting sparked a global reckoning over financial secrecy and its consequences. You can read part two here, and check back soon for part three, to be published in the coming days.

The beginning

Bastian Obermayer (Germany)
Then: Investigative reporter, Süddeutsche Zeitung | Now: Co-founder and director, Paper Trail Media

Before the world learned how a Panamanian law firm sold secrecy to prime ministers, billionaires and criminals, a German reporter opened a message that would spark a global reckoning:  “Hello. This is John Doe. Interested in data?”

“I thought, ‘That’s really interesting,’” the reporter, Bastian Obermayer, recalled a decade later. “And then I went back and changed the sheets because my son had thrown up again.”

German journalist Bastian Obermayer at his desk in April 2016. Image: Christof Stache/AFP via Getty Images

Obermayer’s family — everyone but him — had taken ill, and he’d been balancing his work at Süddeutsche Zeitung with trips to the pharmacy.

The sender was cautious and direct. He insisted on encrypted communication, rejected any face-to-face meetings and warned that disclosure of his identity would endanger his life.

Obermayer agreed to the terms and soon had a cache of internal records from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm known for shell companies.

The material would become part of what the world would come to know as the Panama Papers — 11.5 million confidential documents exposing the offshore financial dealings of politicians, billionaires and world leaders.

There were emails, memos, contracts, spreadsheets and more — enough to map the inner workings of a shadow financial system that regulators and journalists had long suspected and occasionally glimpsed but had never seen documented at such scale or in such granular detail.

They were clearly internal documents, and this John Doe said he had access to more — “more than anything you have ever seen,” he’d promised Obermayer.

The next thing Obermayer did was message his friend and Süddeutsche Zeitung colleague Frederik Obermaier (no relation). Obermaier was on paternity leave but agreed to meet.

“I could already hear the excitement from the first sentence,” Obermaier said. He needed no more convincing.

“I was already in,” he recalled. “Pretty soon we realized this is bigger than everything that we have ever done.”

They realized, too, that it was too big to keep to themselves.

Both had worked on previous ICIJ investigations and they knew what its model made possible: cross-border reporting at a scale no single newsroom could pull off.

They knew, too, that this wasn’t only a German story. It was a global one.

“International stuff is the coolest thing you can do in journalism,” Obermayer said. “When we got the documents, we instantly thought this might be our chance to get the ICIJ to do a project we actually started.”.

It wouldn’t be easy.

First, they had to win over their own newsroom, including colleagues who wanted Süddeutsche Zeitung to keep the scoop for itself. But soon enough, their editor Wolfgang Krach was all in.

Then they had to take the project to ICIJ, which had already built a reputation for global investigations about offshore finance. But the bar for embarking on yet another tax-haven project for ICIJ was high, and its resources were already stretched thin across back-to-back investigations into tax avoidance and private banking.

"wp-caption alignnone"> Gerard Ryle being interviewed in April 2016 at ICIJ’s Washington, D.C. offices in the wake of the Panama Papers.

Image: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

Ryle returned to his hotel and kept testing hunches, running various names through the new data set.

“For this to be exciting, it needed to be bigger and better than the investigations we’ve done before,” he said.

Early searches uncovered some potential subjects for investigation, including a Russian mafia boss and even the leader of a small European nation. But at that moment, all he had were fragments — names in emails and transactions on spreadsheets, connections that hinted at something enormous.

John Doe began sending more and more documents. Before he was through, he’d send 11.5 million of them — enough to map the hidden architecture of the offshore world.

But having the data isn’t the same thing as building a project.

For that, Ryle would need a team.

He approached The Guardian and the BBC first. Securing major news organizations early would make it easier to bring in others — and he would need dozens, maybe hundreds.

He faced pushback from Guardian editors who thought ICIJ had already done the definitive stories on offshore tax havens and this would be more of the same. But Ryle knew this was different — in scale and in names. This investigation would reach into the highest levels of power.

By the end of their lunch at London’s Frontline Club, The Guardian and the BBC were onboard.

Now he needed an American outlet — one with reach and investigative chops.

https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/pop-culture-panama-papers-music/

IMPACT How the Panama Papers rocked pop culture Apr 03, 2023

https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/20160403-panama-papers-global-overview/

Mossack Fonseca Giant Leak of Offshore Financial Records Exposes Global Array of Crime and Corruption Apr 03, 2016

https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/hundreds-of-millions-more-dollars-recouped-by-governments-after-icij-investigations/

IMPACT Hundreds of millions more dollars recouped by governments after ICIJ investigations Apr 03, 2025

Recommended reading IMPACT How the Panama Papers rocked pop culture Apr 03, 2023 Mossack Fonseca Giant Leak of Offshore Financial Records Exposes Global Array of Crime and Corruption Apr 03, 2016 IMPACT Hundreds of millions more dollars recouped by governments after ICIJ investigations Apr 03, 2025