The Data Connecting Politicians, Criminals and a Rogue Industry that hides their cash

Offshore Leaks: Secrets of the Global Elite

About this data

The ICIJ Offshore Leaks database, which you are working with in Neo4j, contains information on more than 800,000 offshore entities that are part of the Pandora, Paradise, Panama Papers and the other Offshore Leaks investigations. The data covers a long time of activities – and links to people and companies in more than 200 countries and territories.

The real value of the database is that it strips away the secrecy that cloaks companies and trusts incorporated in tax havens and exposes the people behind them. This includes, when available, the names of the real owners of those opaque structures. In all, it reveals more than 500,000 names of people and companies behind secret offshore structures. They come from leaked records and not a standardized corporate registry, so there may be duplicates. We suggest you confirm the identities of any individuals or entities located in the database based on addresses or other identifiable information.

There are legitimate uses for offshore companies and trusts. We do not intend to suggest or imply that any persons, companies or other entities included in the database have broken the law or otherwise acted improperly. If you find an error in the database please get in touch with ICIJ.

The Shape of the Data

data model

The Offshore Leaks Database was imported into Neo4j to be used by journalists and researchers to take advantage of the connections in the data. To the left is the basic "property graph" data model. Each data record is called a "node" representing an entity, intermediary, officer or address. They're connected to form a "graph" that reveals a complex web of relationships. To the left you can see a simplified diagram how the nodes connect to each other.

These are the types of nodes that you will encounter in the data:

  • Entity - The offshore legal entity. This could be a company, trust, foundation, or other legal entity created in a low-tax jurisdiction.

  • Officer - A person or company who plays a role in an offshore entity, such as beneficiary, director, or shareholder. The relationships shown in the diagram are just a sample of all the existing ones.

  • Intermediary - A go-between for someone seeking an offshore corporation and an offshore service provider — usually a law-firm or a middleman that asks an offshore service provider to create an offshore firm.

  • Address - The registered address as it appears in the original databases obtained by ICIJ.

  • Other - Other entities found in the data.

How Graphs Helped our Investigation

The Offshore Leaks data exposes a set of connections between people and offshore entities. Graph databases are the best way to explore the relationships between these people and entities. They are much more intuitive to use for this purpose than a SQL database or other types of NoSQL databases.

For example, let's say we want to discover the shortest paths between two entity officers through a set of Entity or Address nodes. This is quite easy with Cypher, Neo4j's graph query language.

MATCH (a:Officer),(b:Officer)
WHERE a.name CONTAINS 'Ross, Jr' 
  AND b.name CONTAINS 'Grant'
MATCH p=allShortestPaths((a)-[:officer_of|intermediary_of|registered_address*..10]-(b))
RETURN p
LIMIT 50

To execute this query, please click on the statement above to put the query in the query editor above.
Hit the triangular button or press Ctrl+Enter to run it and see the resulting visualization.

The resulting graph allows us to explore how these people are connected:

Explore the Pandora, Panama, and Paradise Papers Yourself

Shape of the Data

Understand the data model.

  • What are the nodes?
  • What are the relationships?
  • What are the properties?

Pandora Papers

Explore the latest leak yourself.

  • Cypher query intro
  • Finding companies and individuals
  • Power Players

Paradise Papers

Explore the Appleby data yourself.

  • Cypher query intro
  • Finding companies and individuals
  • Path finding

Panama Papers

Explore the Mossack Fonseca data yourself.

  • Cypher query intro
  • Explore the Panama Law Firm files
  • Connect the dots

Send ICIJ a tip

Help us investigate.

  • Interesting connections
  • Entities that matter to you