Ten years after the Panama Papers, enablers and tax cheats are still being brought to justice

In a court in Cologne, Germany, a former law firm executive sat and listened as his lawyers read out a statement.

“In the end, I accept the consequences,” his lawyers told the courtroom on his behalf at the March hearing.

For Christoph Zollinger, a dual Swiss-Panamanian citizen and former partner at Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca now facing charges of facilitating tax evasion, those consequences have been more than 10 years in the making.

Zollinger’s alleged crimes were revealed by the landmark Panama Papers investigation, and the trial in Cologne has been hailed as a testament to the project’s long reach and the long arm of justice.

In 2016, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and more than 100 media partners published hundreds of stories based on a trove of more than 11.5 million confidential documents from Mossack Fonseca. The Panama Papers were hailed as an unprecedented journalistic project that put tax evasion on the global public agenda.

The investigation contributed to the downfall of political leaders in Iceland, Pakistan and beyond, and sparked arrests, new laws and government probes in dozens of countries across the globe. It exposed an international web of offshore shell companies created for wealthy clients, including star athletes, top business executives and heads of state.

It exposed the magnitude of what was going on. It was mind-blowing. — economist Joseph Stiglitz

The exposé was honored with multiple journalism awards, including a Pulitzer Prize; ICIJ was named second on a list of the world’s biggest tax influencers for 2016; and the “Panama Papers” was mentioned hundreds of thousands of times in media reports in more than 190 countries.

In the decade since, the Panama Papers has cemented its place as a watershed moment in a global push towards greater transparency — and in public and political conversations around tax, secrecy and inequality.

“It exposed the magnitude of what was going on,” economist Joseph Stiglitz told ICIJ. “It was mind-blowing. And it exposed the fact that it wasn’t just the most nefarious individuals in, you might say, poorly governed countries, but senior officials in countries like Iceland and the U.K.”

A slow march to justice

Although Zollinger left Mossack Fonseca years before journalists published the Panama Papers, leaked records showed he was involved in some of the law firm’s most controversial decisions, including its work for sanctioned Syrian businessman Rami Makhlouf. German investigators issued an international arrest warrant for Zollinger in 2020, which was suspended in 2024 when he came forward to face trial.

German authorities have alleged that Zollinger was “a member of a group of companies” that helped clients from around the world “set up so-called ‘offshore companies’ based in Panama or other countries known as ‘tax havens.’ ” If convicted, he faces up to seven and a half years in prison.

Prosecutors have linked Zollinger to a tax loss of about 13 million euros, or roughly $15 million, tied to 50 offshore companies.

In a statement read by his lawyer to the court, Zollinger denied founding a criminal organization but admitted to aiding and abetting tax evasion.

Frederik Obermaier, one of the two journalists who received the original Panama Papers leak and now co-founder and co-director of Paper Trail Media, attended the first day of the trial in Cologne, and said it showed how long law enforcement efforts can take as prosecutors tackle complex cases spanning multiple countries.

But, Obermaier said, it should also serve as a reminder that those who engage in corruption shouldn’t feel at ease.

“If you are working for another law firm, doing something similar, you should be well aware that this could be your destiny in the future,” he said. “Sitting in front of a trial of a court, and having to explain what you have done.”

Several notable figures at the center of the controversy have faced legal consequences or a public reckoning. Mossack Fonseca shuttered its doors within months of the publication. Iceland’s prime minister, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, resigned following nationwide protests after revelations that he and his wife owned a company in the British Virgin Islands.

In 2017, Pakistan’s Supreme Court removed from office the country’s longest-serving prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, as a result of the Panama Papers’ revelations about his family’s properties overseas. A year later, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison on corruption charges and fined $10.6 million. Politicians in Mongolia, Spain and beyond also fell.

Over $1.3B in taxes recouped

Even 10 years after the Panama Papers, updates about the investigation can still command the public’s attention.

Earlier this year, when The Indian Express received a response to its public information request about the government’s investigation into the Panama Papers, Pandora Papers and other financial investigations, the news was big enough to make the newspaper’s front page.

“I-T brings Rs 14,601-crore undisclosed offshore investments to tax,” read the headline. The huge figure includes 13,800 crore rupees — or about $1.4 billion — linked to the Panama Papers.

Those numbers represent the totals that have been identified in tax cases and the dispatch of tax notices, said Ritu Sarin, an ICIJ member and executive editor of news and investigations for The Indian Express. While the sums are yet to be collected, it’s a step towards prosecution and penalty under Indian law.

Like the Zollinger case in Germany, true justice is years in the making.

“[In] Indian courts, things move slowly,” Sarin said. “Investigations take a long time.”

In earlier responses to Indian Express information requests, tax authorities said they filed 46 criminal prosecution complaints and had conducted searches, seizures and surveys as part of 84 Panama Papers-related cases.

Indian authorities aren’t the only ones engaging in a continuous crawl to recoup funds identified in the Panama Papers. ICIJ’s data team estimates at least $1.3 billion have been recouped by authorities internationally that can be directly attributed to the investigation — a number that is likely an undercount, since tallying recouped money is difficult and many countries don’t report the sum collected.

But according to ICIJ’s analysis and information requests, several countries around the world, from Sweden to Belgium to New Zealand to Spain, all recovered figures in the millions. The total may yet rise — as in India, several countries are still engaged in lengthy legal processes.

The investigation marked a turning point for tax departments and regulatory efforts around the world.

“We have learned a lot from the Panama leak and we use that knowledge in our work with new leaks,” a program manager at the Swedish Tax Agency told SVT in 2025. “We have gained better insight into international tax evasion and the central role of different types of enablers.”

A move toward transparency

In the decade since, numerous countries have spearheaded transparency reforms to crack down on enablers of financial secrecy and plug loopholes in the system.

The inequalities persist: The amount of untaxed wealth hidden offshore by the richest 0.1% exceeds the entire wealth of the poorest half of humanity, according to a new Oxfam analysis. That same 0.1% holds approximately 80% of all untaxed offshore wealth.

But Oxfam also noted that while offshore wealth has increased since the publication of the Panama Papers, the proportion going untaxed has declined substantially, a shift that researchers attribute to progress in information-sharing programs between countries.

“The results, if you just look at policy changes in the last 10 years, have been remarkable,” said Gary Kalman, executive director of Transparency International U.S.

In Panama itself, the government made it mandatory for law firms to identify and verify the ultimate beneficial owner they’re working with, and required the Panamanian tax authorities to share foreign citizens’ tax information, including their country of origin, among other changes.

The British Virgin Islands — home to the largest number of offshore companies mentioned in the Panama Papers — passed a 2017 law that requires offshore service providers to report the real owners of companies to the territory’s authorities.

In the wake of the Panama Papers, New Zealand tightened its trust laws to prevent further abuses by foreigners attracted by the country’s once pristine reputation. In the ensuing years, the number of so-called foreign trusts registered in the country plummeted 75%.

In the United Kingdom, members of parliament repeatedly referenced the Panama Papers when passing legislation in 2017 that created the country’s first criminal offense for lawyers who do not report clients’ tax evasion.

Progress toward transparency has come in waves. In the European Union, anti-money laundering directives have tightened loopholes, but while several countries launched ownership registries, some were rolled back after an EU court ruled that a public Luxembourg registry violated business owners’ privacy and potentially put them in harm’s way.

Even though we actually knew about the problem, the power of the Panama Papers meant that suddenly some things became politically realistic. — tax expert and policy analyst Tove Maria Ryding

In the United States, the passing of the Corporate Transparency Act in 2021, which required owners of U.S. companies to disclose their identities to the Treasury Department, was the biggest revision of American anti-money laundering controls in a generation. But execution of its key provision, a beneficial owner database, has stalled under the Trump administration.

United Nations member states are also negotiating a convention on international tax cooperation, which could include a global asset registry. Meanwhile, the OECD has made slow progress toward establishing a global minimum tax rate for corporations.

“Even though we actually knew about the problem, the power of the Panama Papers meant that suddenly some things became politically realistic,” Tove Maria Ryding, a tax expert and policy analyst at the European Network on Debt and Development, told ICIJ. “It was a time when things that were impossible before suddenly became politically possible.”

And it propelled new whistleblowers into action, proving the impact and potential of large, cross-border collaborations — that journalists could work together and still keep sources safe, Obermaier said.

While the Panama Papers whistleblower, John Doe, continues to fear for his life, Obermaier and his colleague Bastian Obermayer wrote in a statement that “our understanding is that John Doe is safe for now, and we hope that continues.”

The impact is evident in all the collaborations that have followed: Paradise Papers, Pandora Papers, FinCEN Files, Cyprus Confidential, and more.

“Ten years ago, it was something very exotic that you had to argue a lot for and convince your bosses to be able to do,” Obermaier said.
“Nowadays, you don’t need these discussions anymore, because every investigative editor knows why it is important to work in a group, and every reporter appreciates the power of the investigative pack.”

‘They remember the Panama Papers’

Part of what propelled momentum for change was just how much the investigation reshaped public perception. Overnight, the Panama Papers became a global shorthand for conversations around corruption, financial crime and inequality.

Viewers of the latest season of Netflix’s action thriller The Night Agent might have caught a passing reference to the investigation, which inspired a plot line about a shadow bank facilitating illicit financial flows.

“I got fixated on this idea going back to the release of the Panama Papers,” showrunner Shawn Ryan told the Motion Pictures Association in February. “There’s this whole shadow banking world that exists to protect rich people who are trying to avoid taxes and dictators who plunder their own countries.”

Though previous investigations, like ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks and Swiss Leaks, had started to crack open the offshore world, the Panama Papers marked a true breaking of the dam, when recognition of tax havens, financial secrecy and the offshore world became a prominent part of public discourse.

“It’s the moment where suddenly your mom understands what it is that you work on,” Ryding joked, recalling conversations that spontaneously began to unroll over dinner tables and in taxi cabs.

Those conversations spilled over into film and media: the Panama Papers directly inspired the 2019 film The Laundromat, starring Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas — the latter two as the infamous owners of the Mossack Fonseca law firm. At its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, Streep said the film told “a very, very dark, black-hearted joke — a joke that’s being played on all of us” by those who make the offshore financial system a reality.

The investigation was also the subject of a 2018 documentary by actor and filmmaker Alex Winter, “The Panama Papers,” which told the story of the journalists behind the scenes.

In the days, months and years since the investigation’s launch, it garnered multiple mentions on late-night TV like “The Daily Show” and “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” cartoons in newspapers and magazines like The New Yorker, and even questions on quiz shows like “Jeopardy!” and National Public Radio’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.” It also inspired musicians — at least five musical groups, 11 record albums, and at least 38 songs have since been named after the investigation.

People haven’t blanked out. No, they remember the Panama Papers. — investigative journalist Ritu Sarin

To this day, the investigation’s impact on the public consciousness still lingers; Sarin remembers traveling home from an ICIJ board meeting in Washington, D.C., a couple years ago, and striking up a conversation with a train conductor who immediately recognized the project.

“Of course, you know, as time passes, things fade,” Sarin said. “But people haven’t blanked out. No, they remember the Panama Papers.”

And as global inequality intensifies, ideas in the public consciousness around inequality, tax and transparency seeded by the Panama Papers have continued to dominate political conversations.

“Now, saying we should tax the rich has become quite mainstream,” Ryding said. “That’s also an important message from the Panama Papers: that there is no lack of money in the world. It’s just that when it comes to funding the public budgets, suddenly, there are some people that pay their taxes and there are the people that don’t.”