The Panama Papers

This week, we sat down with Weinberg Profs. Jeffrey Winters and Jordan Gans-Morse to discuss the “Panama Papers,” or the 11.5 million documents detailing financial and client information about offshore companies administered by Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. The documents, leaked to journalists more than a year ago, started making waves in early April when those journalists started publishing their first stories about the information in the papers. Since then, the Icelandic prime minister has resigned and several other political leaders have found themselves in hot water as a result of the documents’ contents. Winters, who studies elites and the wealthy, and Gans-Morse, who focuses on corruption, walked us through what, exactly, firms like Mossack Fonseca do, as well as the impact of these documents’ release.