'El País' and several European media publish 37.000 names of evaders, including relatives of Chinese leaders and businessmen
Family members of President Xi Jinping (to the left) and former Premier Wen Jiabao (to the right) they make use of tax havens, according to information published this Wednesday– (REUTERS / EFE)
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), based in the city of Washington, publishes this Thursday 37.000 names of Chinese who have assets in tax havens. Among them, the relatives of the country's top leaders meet, large businessmen and some state companies and the destination of their detours is the British Virgin Islands, in the Caribbean, that has just 27.000 inhabitants and is the second largest investor in China.
The ICIJ has previously uncovered controversial data on the use of tax havens around the world from its months-long analysis of 2,5 millions of leaked documents of two financial services companies in those Caribbean islands.
"Aunque la base de datos de los paraísos fiscales la publicamos en junio de 2013 for the first time, we decided not to reveal details about China, Hong Kong and Taiwan until the report was finished. 37.000 names is a conservative number, why many of the names that appear in the documentation are not related to a home address", explains this Wednesday the ICIJ on its website.
The publication on Thursday of a list of 37.000 tax haven usernames, accompanied by details about their activities, will represent the largest amount of secret information ever revealed about the relationship of Chinese citizens with tax havens, the consortium stressed.
The objective of publishing this list is for ordinary citizens to help journalists "a encontrar nuevas pistas y conexiones en los próximos meses, cuando continuará aclarándose la información sobre la relación de la elite china con los paraísos fiscales".
El ICIJ, an international network of journalists specialized in investigative reporting, started working on 1997 with the support of the Center for Public Integrity, an American nonprofit organization dedicated to investigating cross-border issues.
Its investigations into tax havens have had such an impact that the European Commission (CE) and Ireland asked the consortium last year to provide EU member countries with the names and details of EU citizens on the list of alleged tax evaders which he disclosed in 2013.
The group of journalists accessed some 2,5 millions of digital files, mainly from the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands and other tax havens.
Their investigations investigate some 120.000 offshore companies and trusts and about 130.000 personas, including billionaires from Eastern Europe and Indonesia, Russian business executives, American doctors and arms dealers.
El tamaño total de los archivos es "160 veces mayor" to the filtration by WikiLeaks in 2010 of documents from the US Department of State, according to the consortium.
To analyze all the information, we have had 86 journalists from 46 countries and with the collaboration of media such as the British The Guardian And BBC, the french newspaper The world, the spanish The country and the American The Washington Post.
