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The investigation stated that Pakistani ministers and family owned companies and trust funds holding millions of dollars.
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan announced an investigation on Sunday after an investigation claimed that politicians, including his minister, had hidden millions of dollars in offshore tax havens.
According to a survey released by the International Federation of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) on Sunday, about 35 current and former leaders in the analyzed documents are facing accusations ranging from corruption to money laundering and global tax avoidance.
It includes members of Imran Khan’s inner circle, including cabinet ministers and their families, who are said to secretly own companies and hold multi-million-dollar trusts.
“My government will investigate all citizens mentioned in the Pandora document, and if any wrongdoing is found, we will take appropriate action. I call on the international community to regard this serious injustice as similar to a climate change crisis,” Khan Yi Said in a series of tweets.
“We welcome the Pandora document exposing the ill-gotten gains accumulated by the elites through tax evasion and corruption, and laundering money into a financial “safe haven.” The United Nations Secretary-General’s group FACTI calculated that the amount of stolen assets parked in major offshore tax havens was as high as 70,000. One hundred million U.S. dollars.
“If it is not controlled, the inequality between rich and poor countries will increase as the latter’s poverty increases. In turn, this will lead to a large number of economic migration from poor to rich countries, leading to further global economic and social instability,” Khan said.
The “Pandora Documents” investigation involved approximately 600 journalists from media such as The Washington Post, BBC, and The Guardian. The investigation was based on the leakage of approximately 11.9 million documents from 14 financial services companies around the world.
According to the document, King Abdullah II of Jordan created a network of offshore companies and tax havens to accumulate a $100 million real estate empire from Malibu, California to Washington and London.
The BBC quoted King Abdullah’s lawyers as saying that all properties are purchased with personal wealth. For privacy and security reasons, it is a common practice for celebrities to purchase properties through offshore companies.
The documents also show that Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis-facing elections later this week-failed to declare an offshore investment company for the purchase of a $22 million castle in southern France.
In total, ICIJ discovered connections between nearly 1,000 offshore safe haven companies and 336 senior politicians and public officials (including national leaders, cabinet ministers, ambassadors, etc.).
More than two-thirds of the companies are established in the British Virgin Islands.
ICIJ emphasizes that in most countries, it is not illegal to own assets overseas or use shell companies to conduct multinational business.
But for leaders who may openly oppose corruption or advocate austerity measures at home, such revelations are equally embarrassing.
Other revelations from the ICIJ survey include:
-It is said that the family and colleagues of President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan secretly participated in a real estate transaction worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the United Kingdom.
— Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and six family members are accused of secretly owning a network of offshore companies.
— Russian President Vladimir Putin did not directly name him in the document, but he was connected with Monaco’s secret assets through his assistants.
The “Pandora Documents” is the latest in a series of ICIJ large-scale financial document leaks that started with LuxLeaks in 2014, followed by the Panama Documents, Paradise Documents, and FinCen.
The documents behind the latest investigation come from financial services companies in the British Virgin Islands, Panama, Belize, Cyprus, Singapore and Switzerland.
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