The Asian Panama Papers

When English businessman Neil Heywood was found dead at a hotel in Chongqing in 2011, the Chinese authorities were quick to dismiss the cause of death as “overconsumption of alcohol.” But it didn’t take long for the truth to surface. The case was reopened and, the following year, the wife of the city’s Communist Party chief and her aide were convicted of murder by poison. Their motive was an “economic conflict,” the authorities were reported saying.

Five years later, further details of the conflict behind the Heywood case emerged from documents leaked from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.

In April, a group of journalists reported that the alleged murderer, Gu Kailai, set up a company in the British Virgin Islands to buy a luxury villa in the south of France. “Gu murdered the associate because she was afraid he would reveal publicly that she owned the villa,” said Alexa Olesen, one of the reporters who combed through the massive cache of leaked documents. Now Gu’s secret dealings were unveiled. “I was stunned to find links” between the scandal and Mossack Fonseca, Olesen said. (Mossack Fonseca denied any wrongdoing.)

The investigation was part of the “Panama Papers,” the project led by the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) which, since its publication in April, has made waves across the world with revelations about the use of offshore companies by heads of states, celebrities and sportsmen, criminals, and business tycoons.

Greater China was Mossack Fonseca’s most profitable market at the end of 2015. More than 16,000 offshore firms were set up by the firm’s branches in China and Hong Kong, accounting for 29 percent of all the active companies it registered, according to the ICIJ.

The Panama Papers reporting team did not include any Chinese mainland news outlets in order to avoid the risks of retaliation and of dealing with sensitive documents they wouldn’t be able to publish, Olesen told Voice of America in a recent interview. Those few reporters who had access to the 11.5 million documents, along with about 400 other colleagues across the globe, also found paper trails linking secret holdings in tax havens to family members of eight current or former members of the Politburo Standing Committee.

The revelations were translated and published in many languages by dozens of publications around the world. But, in China, government censors made sure to leave no track of the reports. Overseas television news programs that aired in China were cut off immediately, local media were ordered not to cover the issues and, when the Foreign Ministry was asked to react to the news at a regular press briefing on April 5, they declined to comment and also struck that exchange from the transcript of the conference, Olesen explained. “It was as if it never happened,” she said.

An editorial titled “Powerful force is behind Panama Papers,” which appeared on the government-backed Global Times, carefully avoided any reference to the Chinese findings. Instead, it described the whole investigation as a conspiracy orchestrated by Western media that “collected the most eye-catching information from the documents” and “scrutinized” leaders of non-Western countries.

Although the Chinese government is renowned for its crusade against any type of critical coverage, some experts say that censorship has become stricter since the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In 2014, the government's strategy became more evident when a secret white paper circulated within the Party leaked online. The paper revealed the censors’ renewed intention to combat the promotion of "the West's view of media" and enhance surveillance over its citizens.

“Information is released in a manner that suits the political objectives of the leadership,” said David Bandurski, researcher at the University of Hong Kong's China Media Project. “The government emphasizes, for example, the moral failings of those branded corrupt -- how many mistresses they had -- and turns attention away from the institutional causes of corruption,” Bandurski added. “The system is never on trial.”

Like China, in most Asian countries media freedom is worsening, according to the latest report by Reporters Without Borders. However, many ICIJ media partners saw the Panama Papers project revitalize accountability journalism at home and bring greater awareness to issues such as transparency.

In places like Thailand, where the government has been tightening its control on the media, journalists are confident that the country’s strong investigative reporting tradition is slowly making a comeback. “Because of financial constraint and political polarization, media organizations have turned to political conflict reporting and sensational stories in the past 10 years,” said Prangtip Daorueng, a freelance journalist who collaborated on the project with the non-profit news organization Isranews. However, “I found that the Papers [investigation] is a big inspiration for young and enthusiastic journalists in Thailand,” Daorueng said.

Unlike in China, the Thai reporting team found that most of the names included in the Panama Papers were of business tycoons, not politicians. Among the findings were some of the country’s richest families, those that routinely make Forbes’ “Richest” rankings. The reporters thoroughly checked every fact and detail to avoid being caught in defamation lawsuits, and found evidence of offshore companies tied to Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi, a magnate in the beverage industry who is also the country’s second wealthiest individual, and shell firms owned by several members of the Chirathivat family, owner of the country’s biggest retailing company and among Asia’s richest families. “Working on [the] Panama Papers makes me realize that sometimes the world of ‘big money’ can be more mysterious than politics,” Daorueng said.

In an unprecedented turn of events, she added, Thailand’s tax authorities promised a thorough investigation into the matter. “It had never happened before.”

The reaction in India was similar if not faster. Between April 3 and 4, all the media outlets who collaborated on the Panama Papers project simultaneously released the stories they had been working on for months. By that afternoon, the Indian finance minister had already announced the launch of a multi-agency probe team dedicated exclusively to investigating the Indian names which appeared in the Panama Papers, over 500 in all. “India's official response was among the quickest in the world,” said Ritu Sarin, the executive editor of The Indian Express. The Prime Minister's Office was appointed to monitor the probe, “which is quite unprecedented,” Sarin said.

The Indian Express’ reporting team decided to publish only stories about people whose addresses could be verified by a physical visit and who commented on the findings. Tax department officials congratulated them for their coverage, Sarin said. “Of course, we politely told them that no data or documents could be shared,” she added.

Across the sea, in Indonesia, the publication of stories naming local businessmen and politicians with links to offshore firms in tax havens resulted in a different outcome. “I believe the Panama Papers story pushed the Indonesian government to accelerate its plan to grant amnesties to companies and persons who in the past avoid[ed] paying their taxes,” said Wahyu Dhyatmika, one of the journalists who worked on the international investigation. “But on the other hand, for civil society and the public in general, this story made them aware of the existence of a hidden financial structure that enables corporations and individuals to hide their wealth from authorities,” Wahyu said. “This revelation pushed them to demand more transparency from the government.“

The Indonesian journalists who had access to the leaked documents weren’t new to collaborating with the ICIJ on a global investigation. They work for Tempo Media Group, a multimedia news outlet that was repeatedly banned under Suharto’s dictatorship and came to new life after the regime fell in 1998. Tempo’s reporters coped with the country’s obsolete data recording system and uncovered connections between secret offshore companies and several leading politicians. To their surprise, the files provided new details on old corruption and fraud cases that had rocked the political scene years before. After sifting through dozens of emails and corporate records, Wahyu and his colleagues discovered the names of businessman Muhammad Riza Chalid, sometimes referred to by the media as “the gasoline godfather,” Sandiaga Uno, a businessman planning to run in the 2017 governor’s race in Jakarta, and Soegiarto Djoko Tjandra, a man who had been convicted in the Bank Indonesia liquidity support fraud case in 1997-1998.

More than 20 reporters and their editors from seven different Asian countries worked on the Panama Papers, an investigation that has been called historic for the amount of data handled -- 2.6 terabytes -- and the scale of the cross-border collaboration among journalists on five continents. Some of them hailed from small and young nonprofit organizations.

The South Korean Newstapa is an example. It was founded four years ago and has already become the only media outlet in the country to collaborate with the ICIJ on its transnational projects. Its reporting team mainly consists of video journalists and television producers who believe in the power of visual storytelling to cover the most complex issues.

“It is more difficult to do investigative reporting with a camera. People tend to avoid talking in front of cameras,” said Newstapa’s Yoojung Lee. “But visuals make stories more powerful, creating bigger impacts.”

Their series included a story about Ro Jae-Hun, the son of former president Roh Tae-woo, who used Mossack Fonseca’s services to set up secret offshore holdings while his father was delaying completing the payment of fines he owed the government, according to Newstapa. Lee said that the use of tax havens by the son of a former president infamous for corruption sparked public anger and the story even prompted the Panamanian ambassador to Korea to make a pledge for cooperation from the Panamanian side.

In Japan, the government’s reaction to the findings was mild but the Panama Papers set off an unprecedented collaboration between two major news organizations. Kyodo News and the Asahi Shimbun worked together to increase the chances of raising awareness on the issue of tax avoidance and evasion in a country where corruption reporting may be difficult because court records are destroyed after a few years, alleged criminals are seldom named in news reports, and self-censorship is rampant among reporters who fear defamation lawsuits.

For investigative journalists who were accustomed to working as “lone wolves” and to not revealing their sources and discoveries even to colleagues and editors, the cross-border collaboration spurred by the nature of the Panama Papers project represents a new frontier: a way to to reach a broader audience, produce stories that have a bigger impact, and benefit from a greater variety of expertise and knowledge.

“This is hopefully going to be a beginning of a new era of collaboration,” said Wahyu, adding that Tempo is already considering new collaborations with colleagues in Asia. Despite the diversity of challenges in a region with different cultures and attitudes towards the press, many of those who took part in the Panama Papers agree on the added value that it has brought to Asian investigative journalism. After all, as the founder of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, Sheila Coronel, said in 2014, "speaking truth to power is an Asian value."