atlantic

So essentially you are saying you didn't check them all individually? Are these all ill gotten gains? My main question is, did you really follow the money on all of these? I see some really paltry sums, and most are somehow implicated in bribery. This isn't to condone this behavior, but was there any thought put into privacy considerations? Considering the amount of accounts it is highly dubious that each of the 160 journalists involved spent at least a good portion of a year investigating these accounts. The individual blurbs are mostly vague and provide little information about the 'criminal deeds'.

I am sure many of these clients are unsavory and should never been able to get a bank account in Switzerland, but did this expose in any way balance their right to privacy - i.e. was that a factor at all? Would you stand behind the statement that each of these 18,000 accounts were looked at individually? Many of them are 'hiding' less in value than you average 1 bedroom flat in a city like Zurich.

Well, not everywhere. Just in countries where bribes are essentially legal.

Why are you focusing on cleaning up the ocean instead of first starting to prevent the waste from reaching the oceans? It's what people usually do before they clean up.

We didn’t literally sit down and Google every single name that appeared in our data

I'd say Googling at least the names would have been pretty basic due diligence. In theory of course there should have been some proper investigations before publishing all those names and accounts vs relying on someone who knows someone. But what do I know!