#Panamapapers round-up: 14 things we learned

Main people linked with offshore account documents and reaction to leak

Mossack Fonseca is the law firm at the centre of the Panama Papers leak, which lifted the lid on how offshore companies are used by the global elite to conceal the ownership and control of assets and property worth billions. Photograph: Carlos Jasso/Reuters
Mossack Fonseca is the law firm at the centre of the Panama Papers leak, which lifted the lid on how offshore companies are used by the global elite to conceal the ownership and control of assets and property worth billions. Photograph: Carlos Jasso/Reuters

1. Twelve national leaders are among 143 politicians, their families and close associates from around the world known to have been using offshore tax havens.

2. A $2bn trail leads all the way to Vladimir Putin. The Russian president's best friend - a cellist called Sergei Roldugin - is at the centre of a scheme in which money from Russian state banks is hidden offshore. Some of it ends up in a ski resort where in 2013 Putin's daughter Katerina got married. Mr Putin has denied any wrongdoing in relation to the leaks.

3. Among national leaders with offshore wealth are Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan's prime minister; Ayad Allawi, ex-interim prime minister and former vice-president of Iraq; Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine; Alaa Mubarak, son of Egypt's former president; and the prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, who stepped down on Tuesday following the revelations.

4. Iceland has since named fisheries minister Sigurdur Ingi Johannsson as the replacement prime minister and has called for an early election.

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5. Documents show a £250,000 deposit in the name of a British Virgin Islands (BVI) company being used to support the purchase of a London house by former Fine Gael strategist and Rehab chief executive Frank Flannery. Mr Flannery said he cannot explain the documents and there was no third party involved in the transaction.

6. Simon Cowell, Jackie Chan, Stanley Kubrick and Nick Faldo were among celebrity names linked to the Panama Papers.

7. A BVI company that contested IBRC's attempt to seize a €70 million shopping mall in Kiev from businessman Seán Quinn's family was set up by Mossack Fonseca. The State-owned bank, in proceedings pending in the Irish courts, is alleging the company was part of a conspiracy orchestrated by the Quinn family.

8. In the UK, six members of the House of Lords, three former Conservative MPs and dozens of donors to British political parties have had offshore assets.

9. The families of at least eight current and former members of China's supreme ruling body, the politburo, have been found to have hidden wealth offshore. The Chinese government has branded the findings as "groundless" and has remained silent on the leak since.

10. Twenty-three individuals who have had sanctions imposed on them for supporting the regimes in North Korea, Zimbabwe, Russia, Iran and Syria have been clients of Mossack Fonseca. Their companies were harboured by the Seychelles, the British Virgin Islands, Panama and other jurisdictions.

11. Michael Grahammer, the chief executive of Hypo Landesbank Vorarlberg, an Austrian lender mentioned in the documents,became one of the first top bankers to quit over the leaks. The bank was reportedly connected to offshore companies through trustees in Liechtenstein. Austrian financial markets regulator FMA is investigating whether Hypo Vorarlberg and another Austrian bank mentioned in the Panama Papers, Raiffeisen Bank International, took steps required to prevent money laundering.

12. A key member of Fifa's powerful ethics committee, which is supposed to be spearheading reform at world football's scandal-hit governing body, acted as a lawyer for individuals and companies recently charged with bribery and corruption.

13. Swiss police raided Uefa's headquarters in Nyon to seize details of a TV rights contract signed by the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, following the Panama Papers leak. The office of the attorney general of Switzerland said the search was "motivated by the suspicion of criminal mismanagement" relating to the sale of TV rights but that "no specific individual is being targeted by these proceedings".

14. British prime minister David Cameron defended his family's tax arrangements after disclosures about an offshore fund established by his father. He admitted he benefited from his late father's offshore investment fund, identified in the Panama Papers, but said he sold his shares in 2010.

Guardian Service