Company
Date Published
Author
Michael Hunger
Word count
865
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (ICIJ) has published a massive dataset known as the Pandora Papers, which contains leaked information about shell companies, offshore accounts, and secret ultimate owners. The dataset is staggering in its scope, with 600 journalists from 150 media outlets in 117 countries working on it. The ICIJ used an open-source stack consisting of Neo4j and Linkurious to structure and analyze the data, which includes 11.9 million files and 14 offshore service providers. The data model for the investigation consists of entities (shell companies or offshore constructs), intermediaries (law firms or banks that helped create and manage these entities), officers (proxy or real owners/shareholders/directors of these entities), and addresses (registered addresses for these entities). The dataset is now being integrated into the Offshore Leaks database, which will be published in a few weeks. The ICIJ has also created an interactive document exploring the stories behind high-profile politicians' use of offshore companies, including 35 current or former country leaders and prominent politicians. A Neo4j graph database instance has been set up to query and visualize the data, with examples provided for data exploration.