Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

The Pandora Papers has been all over the news this week. It's the latest in a series of data leaks

that detail the financial affairs of some of the wealthiest people in the world. This new

report is a leak of almost 12 million documents that reveal the hidden wealth of some of the

world's rich and powerful. Five and a half years ago, the same group of journalists released

the Panama Papers, which focused on a leak from a single Panamanian law firm.

The Pandora leaks come from confidential records at 14 different offshore wealth service

firms and wealth management firms around the world.

At present, it's not clear how the journalists got access to this data, and we'll discuss

that issue near the end

of this piece.

The Pandora paper's leak is different to the prior leaks as it's not about corporate tax avoidance.

Instead the data is about wealthy individuals and their use of offshore company structures.

The leak is more about how people keep their finances private

than specific wrongdoing. The leak data is a who's who of business people, politicians,

celebrities and rock stars. It includes 35 current and former national leaders and 130 people

on the Forbes list of billionaires.

The country with the most politicians on the list is Ukraine.

You'll note that there are no US politicians on the list and very few Americans turn

up in the papers at all.

We'll go into more detail on this in just a moment.

But it's partially due to the low existing tax

...