Names of two Pakistanis, Shaukat Aziz and Ayaz Khan Niazi also included in the new database of documents, Paradise Papers, released by International Consortium of Journalists Sunday night.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the group that had unravelled the Panama Papers a year ago, has now released Paradise Papers.
The leak, which includes 13.4 million documents, comprises a major part of documents leaked from company ‘Appleby’. The documents were obtained from two companies in Singapore and Bermuda by a German newspaper and shared with the ICIJ.
The world’s biggest businesses, heads of state and global figures in politics, entertainment and sport who have sheltered their wealth in secretive tax havens are being revealed this week in a major new investigation into Britain’s offshore empires.
The paradise papers include financial wheelings and dealings of some of the world’s most powerful political players including Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II and US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, 714 Indian businessmen, politicians and two Pakistani Shaukat Aziz and Ayaz Khan Niazi.
Former Prime Minister Shoukat Aziz had set up the trust in Delaware (USA) before becoming finance minister. Interestingly, the trust was neither declared during his stint as finance minister nor as prime minister.
Moreover, former National Insurance Corporation Limited chairperson Ayaz Khan Niazi has also been identified in the records in connection with four offshore holdings in British Virgin Islands
The material, which has come from two offshore service providers and the company registries of 19 tax havens, was obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with partners including the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times.
The publication of this investigation, for which more than 380 journalists have spent a year combing through data that stretches back 70 years, comes at a time of growing global income inequality.