The Panama Papers affair has widened, with a huge database of documents relating to more than 200,000 offshore accounts posted online and three persons with Guyanese connections have been listed.
The three are businessman Edris K Dookie who has had connections with the oil industry, Guyana-based Brazilian Yucatan Coutinho Reis who has been engaged in mining and other ventures and Chetwynd R F Bowling.
Offshore companies and accounts with such companies are not illegal per se though they will raise questions about tax payments and other matters.
According to the BBC, the database became accessible from yesterday at offshoreleaks.icij.org.
The Panama Papers have evoked widespread interest and led to several heads of government coming under pressure. The biggest casualty this far is the Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson who resigned after questions were raised about his and his wife’s holdings
The papers belonged to Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca and were leaked by a source simply known as “John Doe”. The company denies any wrongdoing.
Last week it issued a “cease and desist” order to prevent the database being made public but the organisation that has the documents, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), went ahead.
The documents, the BBC said, list more than 200,000 shell companies, foundations and trusts set up in more than 20 tax havens around the world.
Some 2.6 terabytes of information – 11.5 million documents – was originally given to the German newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, by “John Doe” more than a year ago.
The paper allowed the ICIJ to have access. Through it hundreds of journalists, including from the BBC, then worked on the data. Their reporting was published last month.
The BBC reported that the ICIJ insists that yesterday’s online database is not a data dump of the kind used by the Wikileaks organisation.
The ICIJ said: “The database will not include records of bank accounts and financial transactions, emails and other correspondence, passports and telephone numbers. The selected and limited information is being published in the public interest.”
