Paradise Papers leak shows Tax Haven secrets of Ultra-Rich of the World

The Paradise Papers document leak revealed more than 13.4 million internal documents on Sunday showing how major world players take advantage of offshore tax havens, including Britain's Queen Elizabeth II's private estate, media reports said on Monday. The leak, known as the Paradise Papers, comes more than a year after the Panama Papers, for which the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing offshore banking practices of the world’s elite.

The massive trove of material reveals the inner workings of global companies, including offshore law-firm Appleby and Singapore-based Asiaciti Trust, which administer offshore accounts for wealthy investors. There are also details from 19 corporate entities maintained by governments in tax-haven countries.

According to Appleby’s website, it specialises in providing offshore legal services for "global public and private companies, financial institutions, and high net-worth individuals". Asiaciti Trust says it is "an international trust and corporate services provider".

As with the Panama Papers, the leaked data was shared with the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which brought it to the ICIJ, which in turn led the collaborative investigation that involved nearly 100 media partners worldwide, including the New York Times, the Guardian, the BBC and NBC News.

It details extensive offshore dealings by US President Donald Trump's cabinet members, advisers and donors, including substantial payments from a firm co-owned by Russian President Vladimir Putin's son-in-law to the shipping group of the US Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross.

The leak shows how social media giants Twitter and Facebook received millions in investments that can be traced back to Russian state financial institutions along with ggressive tax avoidance by multinational corporations, including Nike and Apple.

Offshore finance is about a place outside of one's own nation's regulations to which companies or individuals can reroute money, assets or profits to take advantage of lower taxes, reports the BBC.

These jurisdictions are known as tax havens to the layman, or the more stately offshore financial centres (OFCs) to the industry. They are generally stable, secretive and reliable, often small islands but not exclusively so, and can vary on how rigorously they carry out checks on wrongdoing.