Hello, this is Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuela Saragossa. Coming up, some of the British

Queen's wealth is invested in offshore tax havens. That's according to a huge new leak of financial

documents revealing how the powerful invests their wealth. But should we really be surprised?

And we hear why these sorts of offshore funds may soon be a thing of the past.

These Paradise Papers are only a relics of a past that is hopefully in the next few months,

in the next year or two, are going to be things that are long gone.

That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC.

A huge new leak of financial documents has revealed how the powerful and ultra-wealthy

secretly invest vast amounts of cash in offshore tax havens. The leak dubbed

the Paradise Papers contains over 13 million documents, mostly from one leading firm in offshore

finance. BBC journalists, as we speak, are trawling through them. But so far, the documents

reveal, amongst other things, that Donald Trump's commerce secretary has a stake in a firm dealing with Russians sanctioned by the US.

And they include details of the millions of pounds invested by the British Queen's private estate in a Cayman Islands fund.

Embarrassing, perhaps, but is it par for the course in the investment industry?

Our business correspondent is

Dominic O'Connell. I started by asking him, first of all, what is an offshore fund exactly?

It's any kind of fund that's located outside of the investor's tax jurisdiction. So if you're in the UK,

an offshore fund could be in the US. But it's more likely to be somewhere where tax is very low, a tax haven,

which has, most of these tax havens have built up very substantial financial services industries,

which do nothing but services offshore funds.

And the reason they were set up to begin with, although they've sort of moved along over the years, is that you needed to have a place

which was a neutral playing ground for international investors. So you have investors from the US,

...