Q: What do Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Putin’s son-in-law Kirill Shamalov and offshore islands have in common? A: The Paradise Papers. Here is Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman speaking with Frederik Obermaier, investigative reporter for the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and co-author of the Paradise Papers. Frederik discusses the techniques and consequences of the offshoring of wealth, and names some names of figures discovered as complicit. Among the names are two of the current administration’s cabinet: Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

On a somber note, Obermaier notes that this type of reporting is not without risk. A colleague, Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was part of the team working on the Panama Papers—an earlier much more limited release of records from the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca—was murdered in a bomb blast in early October. Her reporting had focused on the corruption of Maltese officials revealed in the Panama Papers and she had reported receiving death threats fifteen days before the fatal explosion.

 

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