Nawaz Sharif Disqualified: All You Need to Know About Panama Papers That Cost Pakistan PM His Job

The removal of Prime Minister of Pakistan followed by revelations made by International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in the documents popularly known as Panama Papers.

Islamabad, July 28: Supreme Court of Pakistan disqualified Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on the charges of holding undeclared assets in offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands on Friday. The disqualification was followed by a case filed by a petitioner who said the revelations made in the Panama Papers showed Pakistani PM held 6 undeclared properties worth many million dollars. This was the second removal of the Prime Minister of a nation followed by revelations made by International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in the documents popularly known as Panama Papers.

What are Panama Papers? 

Panama Papers are known as a cache of 11.5 million records which were appropriated by International Consortium of Investigative Journalists secretly by a person related to Panama based Law Firm Mossack Fonseca. The website of the ICIJ stated the leak of 11.5 million documents exposed the offshore holdings of 12 current and former world leaders and reveals how associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin secretly shuffled as much as $2 billion through banks and shadow companies. [Read: Nawaz Sharif Disqualified As PM by Pakistan Supreme Court in Panama Papers Case]

The website of the organisation further claimed files exposed offshore companies controlled by the prime minister of Iceland, the king of Saudi Arabia and the children of the president of Azerbaijan and the Prime Minister of Pakistan.

They also include at least 33 people and companies blacklisted by the U.S. government because of evidence that they’d been involved in wrongdoing, such as doing business with Mexican drug lords, terrorist organizations like Hezbollah or rogue nations like North Korea and Iran.

The leaked data covers nearly 40 years, from 1977 through the end of 2015. It allows a never-before-seen view inside the offshore world — providing a day-to-day, decade-by-decade look at how dark money flows through the global financial system, breeding crime and stripping national treasuries of tax revenues.

The website further claims the documents made it clear that major banks are big drivers behind the creation of hard-to-trace companies in the British Virgin Islands, Panama and other offshore havens. The files list nearly 15,600 paper companies that banks set up for clients who want keep their finances under wraps, including thousands created by international giants UBS and HSBC.