In the digital age, offshore secrets are hard to keep. In its latest revelations, the Guardian is publishing investigations based on the leak of 1.3m internal files from the company register of the Bahamas, one of the world’s most notorious tax havens.
The data has brought to light details of the financial interests of politicians, entrepreneurs, financiers – and fraudsters.
Five months after the release of the Panama Papers, this new cache of information from the world of offshore tax havens contains the names of directors and some shareholders at nearly 176,000 shell companies, trusts and foundations.
It was received by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, and will be shared with the public in a Bahamas leaks database, built by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in Washington and also launched on Wednesday.
Among the revelations are the offshore business dealings of the home secretary, Amber Rudd, along with her involvement in a fund where a fellow director was jailed for making misleading statements to investors.
The former EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes has been forced to admit she breached the European commission’s code of conduct by failing to declare her directorship of an offshore company while she was actively policing multinationals.
The data also contains trails left by Cem Kinay (German), a property developer wanted by Interpol for bribery, and accused of making a possibly corrupt payment to Michael Misick, the former premier of the Turks and Caicos islands, a British overseas territory.
As previous reports have revealed, and the latest leak confirms, David Cameron’s father used the Bahamas as a base from which his Blairmore investment fund avoided tax for three decades.
It was also the offshore address of a Mongolian goldmining company whose directors included Sukhbaatar Batbold, an entrepreneur who would go on to become Mongolia’s prime minister.
There are many legal reasons for choosing a Bahamas letterbox, chief among them the absence of taxes on company profits, capital gains, income and inheritance.
Another reason is anonymity. The Bahamas claims to be a transparent jurisdiction with a public register of companies, but the information shared from the seat of government in Nassau is limited.
The corporate registry is supposed to contain the names and addresses of all directors and officers and can in theory be consulted online, but there is no requirement to register the owners of a company with the authorities. Unlike the Cayman Islands and Jersey, the Bahamas has not responded to public pressure to introduce government-held registers of beneficial owners.
The Bahamas registry website is often unavailable and the information it contains is patchy. Neelie Kroes, for example, does not appear in the online entry for the company of which she was a director. Complete information can often only be obtained by phone and fax or a visit in person.
Importantly, it is not possible to search for names of individual directors, but only by company name, which can make wrongdoing hard to track.
The Bahamas has bilateral information-sharing agreements with 32 countries, including the UK, Germany, France and the US, but has completed no new deals since 2013. Many of these agreements are of limited use because they are with other tax havens, such as Guernsey and Malta, or with tiny economies such as Greenland.
Even with a bilateral agreement, investigators cannot ask the Bahamas for all of the information it may have on an individual. They must first have the name of their bank or offshore company.
“We believe this kind of basic information, the names of people who are linked to what companies, is something that should be openly available – just as the former prime minister David Cameron himself once indicated,” the ICIJ’s director, Gerard Ryle, said. “We are publishing this information as a public service.”
With $223bn (£172bn) stashed in the small Caribbean nation’s banks, 26 times its GDP, the former British colony is increasingly seen as clinging to the secrecy that has allowed it to attract such money. Representatives from the Bahamas have been touring the conference circuit.
Offshore service providers will gather in Panama City next week for a conference about marketing their services to Latin American clients. Among the banks and law firms sponsoring the event, one of the logos on the promotional website stands out: the official seal of the of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas.
“What do you think they are there for, to push the beaches?” asked Mark Morris, an adviser to the European parliament and the Tax Justice Network. “They are going round the world saying ‘bring your untaxed money to us’. People send money to Nassau by the billions because they know it’s safe. Even compared to Switzerland, the Bahamas is now the number one tax haven.”
Responding to queries about its record of cooperation in fighting tax evasion and money laundering, the Bahamas financial services ministry said it was committed to transparency.
“The Bahamas does not tolerate ‘dirty money’,” it said. “The Bahamas has a long history of honouring its international obligations including cooperating with international authorities with respect to legally conducted investigations and/or asset recovery initiatives when received through the proper channels.”
