Panama Papers: How the 11.5 million documents were analysed (Wired UK)

The biggest leak in history has connected more than 70 current and former world leaders to tax evasion schemes that channel billions of pounds into secretive off-shore accounts. This is how the data was analysed. The Panama Papers show that law firm Mossack Fonseca helped hundreds of clients, with connections to some of the most powerful people in the world, launder money, dodge tax and potentially avoid sanctions. The papers themselves were leaked to news organisations by an unknown person and have been shared with more than 100 news organisations and 400 journalists – the investigation has been ongoing for almost a year. The process of making the raw data accessible for journalists involved converting it to digital formats, high-performance computers, and algorithms to find well known names among the thousands of details. While the actual leaked documents have not been published -– the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) say the full list of companies linked to the papers will be revealed in May – how much data they contain is known.