The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has released a new large cache of leaked data from its Pandora Papers investigation, which showed that three more people used Bangladesh as their address to open companies in the so-called tax haven.
ICIJ added the third and final batch of new information to its Offshore Leaks Database, incorporating additional data from the Pandora Papers investigation, last Tuesday.
The latest Pandora Papers leaks took the number of individuals who used Bangladeshi addresses to 11.
According to the new leaks, S Hedayet Ullah and S Rumi Saifullah have reportedly invested in Transglobal Consulting (HK) Limited in Hong Kong and Shaheda Begum Shanti invested in an off-shore company named JAS Limited.
Hedayet and Saifullah used the same address of a house on Northern Road in Baridhara DOHS, Dhaka.
Shaheda used the address of Spring Garden Tower at Shahjalal town, on the outskirts of Sylhet city.
The new data lists beneficial owners, shareholders, directors and other types of officers from more than 9,000 offshore companies, foundations and trusts, including these three Bangladeshi nationals.
The new data comes from seven offshore providers headquartered in Hong Kong, Belize, the British Virgin Islands, Panama, Switzerland and Dubai.
It revealed confidential information about the owners of offshore entities mostly registered in the British Virgin Islands, a notoriously secretive jurisdiction, between 1980 and 2018.
The first batch of Pandora Papers data was released by ICIJ in October last year with the names of hundreds of thousands of people from across the world. The second batch was published in December.
Both batches included eight individuals in total — Mohammad Bhai, Sakina Miraly, Nihad Kabir, Anita Rani Bhowmik, Islam Manzurul, Walter Pollak, Daniel Ernesto Lubatti and Sayedul Huda Chowdhury — who used Bangladeshi addresses to open firms in the British Virgin Islands.
The Pandora Papers is a follow-up to a similar project released in 2016 called the “Panama Papers" compiled by ICIJ.
Dubbed the “biggest” and “unprecedented”, the Pandora Papers investigation was based on a trove of more than 11.9 million records from 14 offshore service providers that offer services to world leaders, wealthy individuals, celebrities, criminals and multinationals worldwide.
The ICIJ does not say all the people and firms made their fortunes by breaking the law, but it suggests many tried to exploit the legal loopholes to evade taxes or smuggle their money out of their country.
