
Panama Papers: The Shady World of Offshore Companies
Eleven thousand leaked documents from a single Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca, blow open the machinery of offshore finance used by politicians, athletes, and business figures around the world. The film walks through how shell companies are formed, how they move money across borders, and why so many of them exist in places like Panama, the British Virgin Islands, and other jurisdictions built to keep ownership hidden. News footage and document excerpts trace the leak's fallout as governments launch investigations and public figures scramble to explain accounts they never disclosed. Journalists and financial experts break down the legal gray zones separating tax avoidance from outright fraud, and the film lays out who actually loses when the wealthy route their money around the tax systems everyone else pays into. It treats the leak as a case study in a much larger offshore industry that keeps operating long after the headlines fade, built on secrecy that ordinary banking laws were never designed to crack open.