belfasttelegraph | Mr Hrafnsson, who worked on the ‘Cablegate’
leak of diplomatic documents in 2010, suggested the withholding of
documents is understandable to maximise the impact, but said that in the
end the papers should be published in full for the public to access.
He
told RT's Afshin Rattansi on Going Underground: "When they are saying
this is responsible journalism, I totally disagree with the overall tone
of that.
"I do have a sympathy to stalled releases, we certainly did that in
WikiLeaks in 2010 and 2011 with the Diplomatic Cables… but in the end
the entire cache was put online in a searchable database.
"That is
what I’d want to see with these Panama Papers, they should be available
to the general public in such a manner so everybody, not just the group
of journalists working on the data, can search it."
The reports
are from a global group of news organisations working with the
Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
(ICIJ).
The consortium have been processing the legal records from the
Mossack Fonseca law firm that were first leaked to the German
Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.
Shell companies are not
necessarily illegal. People or companies might use them to reduce their
tax bill legally, by benefiting from low tax rates in countries like
Panama, the Cayman Islands and Bermuda.
But the practice is
frowned upon, particularly when used by politicians, who then face
criticism for not contributing to their own countries' economies.
Because offshore accounts and companies also hide the names of the
ultimate owners of investments, they are often used to illegally evade
taxes or launder money.
Presenter Rattansi mentions that the ICIJ
is funded by the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment think tank, the
Rockefellers and George Soros.
