Panama Papers: 2.5 terabytes of data leaked

Panama Papers: 2.5 terabytes of data leaked

It reveals that the firm with impunity for decades helped clients launder their money and avoid taxes.

The documents, dubbed "the Panama Papers," have been acquired by the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists from Washington and other media, including the BBC and the Guardian.

"The Panama Papers consist of 2.6 terabytes of data, 11.5 million documents and 214,000 shell companies. This is the biggest leak of information that journalists ever encountered," the paper stressed.

The database contains e-mails, PDF files, photos, and parts of the firm's internal database from the 1970s until the spring of 2016.

The leaked data to which journalists have had access was divided into folders for each company individually. Each folder contains e-mails, contracts, transcripts and scanned documents, and in some cases contains several thousand pages of data.

The documents prove the connection between current and former world leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, longtime Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with illegal financial transactions.

The British Guardian was among the first to announced that a network of secret offshore contracts and high loans of two billion dollars "leads to President of Russia Vladimir Putin." However, the Russian leader is not directly mentioned in the documents.

Top officials from 58 countries, including 70 current and former leaders, are mentioned in the papers. Among them are Argentinian President Mauricio Macri, Iceland's PM David Gunnlaugsson, Saudi King Salman, UAE President Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan, and Ukrainian President Petro Poroschenko.