title: Drama

text: Danish Iqbal's play "Dara Shikoh" directed by M. S. Sathyu is a modern classic that uses newer theatre techniques and a contemporary perspective. His other plays are "Sahir". on the famous lyricist and revolutionary poet. "Kuchh Ishq kiya Kuchh Kaam" is another play written by Danish which is basically a Celebration of Faiz's poetry, featuring events from the early part of his life, particularly the events and incidents of pre-partition days which shaped his life and ideals. "Chand Roz Aur Meri Jaan" – another play inspired from Faiz's letters written from various jails during the Rawalpindi Conspiracy days. He has written 14 other plays including "Dilli Jo Ek Shehr Thaa" and "Main Gaya Waqt Nahin hoon". Shahid's "Three B" is also a significant play. He has been associated with many groups like 'Natwa' and others. Zaheer Anwar has kept the flag of Urdu theatre flying in Kolkata. Unlike the writers of previous generation Sayeed, Shahid, Danish Iqbal and Zaheer do not write bookish plays but their work is a product of performing tradition. Iqbal Niyazi of Mumbai has written several plays in Urdu, his play "AUR KITNE JALYANWALA BAUGH?" won a National award other awards. Hence this is the only generation after Amanat and Agha Hashr who actually write for stage and not for libraries.


title: Drama

text: Chinese theatre has a long and complex history. Today it is often called Chinese opera although this normally refers specifically to the popular form known as Beijing opera and Kunqu; there have been many other forms of theatre in China, such as zaju.


title: Drama

text: Japanese Nō drama is a serious dramatic form that combines drama, music, and dance into a complete aesthetic performance experience. It developed in the 14th and 15th centuries and has its own musical instruments and performance techniques, which were often handed down from father to son. The performers were generally male (for both male and female roles), although female amateurs also perform Nō dramas. Nō drama was supported by the government, and particularly the military, with many military commanders having their own troupes and sometimes performing themselves. It is still performed in Japan today.


title: Drama

text: Kyōgen is the comic counterpart to Nō drama. It concentrates more on dialogue and less on music, although Nō instrumentalists sometimes appear also in Kyōgen. Kabuki drama, developed from the 17th century, is another comic form, which includes dance.


title: Drama

text: Modern theatrical and musical drama has also developed in Japan in forms such as "shingeki" and the Takarazuka Revue.


title: Z

text: Z (or z) is the 26th and last letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its usual names in English are "zed" () and "zee" (), with an occasional archaic variant "izzard" ().


title: Z

text: In most English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the letter's name is "zed" , reflecting its derivation from the Greek "zeta" (this dates to Latin, which borrowed Y and Z from Greek), but in American English its name is "zee" , analogous to the names for B, C, D, etc., and deriving from a late 17th-century English dialectal form.


title: Z

text: Another English dialectal form is "izzard" . This dates from the mid-18th century and probably derives from Occitan or the French , whose reconstructed Latin form would be "*idzēta", perhaps a Vulgar Latin form with a prosthetic vowel. Its variants are still used in Hong Kong English and Cantonese.


title: Z

text: Other languages spell the letter's name in a similar way: in Italian, Basque, and Spanish, in Icelandic (no longer part of its alphabet but found in personal names), in Portuguese, in Swedish, in Danish, in Dutch, Indonesian, Polish, Romanian, and Czech, in German (capitalised as a noun), in Norwegian, in French, in Japanese, and in Vietnamese. Several languages render it as or , e.g. or more rarely in Finnish (sometimes dropping the first "t" altogether; , or the latter of which is not very commonplace). In Standard Chinese pinyin, the name of the letter Z is pronounced , as in "zi", although the English "zed" and "zee" have become very common. In Esperanto the name of the letter Z is pronounced .


title: Z

text: The Semitic symbol was the seventh letter, named "zayin", which meant "weapon" or "sword". It represented either the sound as in English and French, or possibly more like (as in Italian ', ').


title: Z

text: The Greek form of Z was a close copy of the Phoenician Zayin (), and the Greek inscriptional form remained in this shape throughout ancient times. The Greeks called it "zeta", a new name made in imitation of "eta" (η) and "theta" (θ).


title: Z

text: In earlier Greek of Athens and Northwest Greece, the letter seems to have represented ; in Attic, from the 4th century BC onwards, it seems to have stood for and – there is no consensus concerning this issue. In other dialects, such as Elean and Cretan, the symbol seems to have been used for sounds resembling the English voiced and voiceless "th" (IPA and , respectively). In the common dialect (koine) that succeeded the older dialects, ζ became , as it remains in modern Greek.


title: Z

text: The Etruscan letter "Z" was derived from the Phoenician alphabet, most probably through the Greek alphabet used on the island of Ischia. In Etruscan, this letter may have represented .


title: Z

text: The letter Z was borrowed from the Greek Zeta, most likely to represent the sound /t͡s/. At c. 300 BC, Appius Claudius Caecus, the Roman censor, removed the letter Z from the alphabet, allegedly due to his distaste for the letter, in that it "looked like the tongue of a corpse". A more likely explanation is the sound had disappeared from Latin, making the letter useless for spelling Latin words. It is also thought due to rhotacism, Z became a trilled R sound, /r/. Whatever the case may be, Appius Claudius' distaste for the letter Z is today credited as the reason for its removal. A few centuries later, after the Roman Conquest of Greece, Z was again borrowed to spell words from the prestigious Attic dialect of Greek.


title: Z

text: Before the reintroduction of "z", the sound of zeta was written "s" at the beginning of words and "ss" in the middle of words, as in ' for "belt" and ' for "banker".


title: Z

text: In some inscriptions, "z" represented a Vulgar Latin sound, likely an affricate, formed by the merging of the reflexes of Classical Latin , and : for example, ' for ' "January", ' for ' "deacon", and ' for ' "today". Likewise, sometimes replaced in words like ' for ' "to baptize". In modern Italian, "z" represents or , whereas the reflexes of ' and ' are written with the letter "g" (representing when before "i" and "e"): ', '. In other languages, such as Spanish, further evolution of the sound occurred.


title: Z

text: Old English used "S" alone for both the unvoiced and the voiced sibilant. The Latin sound imported through French was new and was not written with "Z" but with "G" or "I". The successive changes can be seen in the doublet forms "jealous" and "zealous". Both of these come from a late Latin ', derived from the imported Greek '. The earlier form is "jealous"; its initial sound is the , which developed to Modern French . John Wycliffe wrote the word as or .


title: Z

text: "Z" at the end of a word was pronounced "ts", as in English "assets", from Old French ' "enough" (Modern French '), from Vulgar Latin "" ("to sufficiency").


title: Z

text: In earlier times, the English alphabets used by children terminated not with "Z" but with "&" or related typographic symbols. In her 1859 novel "Adam Bede", George Eliot refers to "Z" being followed by "&" when her character Jacob Storey says, "He thought it <nowiki>[Z]</nowiki> had only been put to finish off th' alphabet like; though ampusand would ha' done as well, for what he could see."


title: Z

text: Some Latin based alphabets have extra letters on the end of the alphabet. The last letter for the Icelandic, Finnish and Swedish alphabets is Ö, while it is Å for Danish and Norwegian. In the German alphabet, the umlauts ("Ä/ä", "Ö/ö", and "Ü/ü") and the letter "ß" ("Eszett" or "scharfes S") are regarded respectively as modifications of the vowels "a/o/u" and as a (standardized) variant spelling of "ss", not as independent letters, so they come after the unmodified letters in the alphabetical order. The German alphabet ends with "z".


title: Z

text: A glyph variant of Z originating in the medieval Gothic minuscules and the Early Modern Blackletter typefaces is the "tailed z" (German ', also '). In some Antiqua typefaces, this letter is present as a standalone letter or in ligatures. Ligated with long s (ſ), it is part of the origin of the Eszett (ß) in the German alphabet. The character ezh (Ʒ) resembles a tailed z, which came to be indistinguishable from the yogh (ȝ) in Middle English writing.


title: Z

text: Unicode assigns codepoints and in the Letterlike Symbols and Mathematical alphanumeric symbols ranges respectively.


title: Z

text: It represents in words like "seizure". More often, this sound appears as or in words such as "measure", "decision", etc. In all these words, developed from earlier by "yod"-coalescence.


title: Z

text: Few words in the Basic English vocabulary begin or end with , though it occurs within other words. It is the least frequently used letter in written English, with a frequency of about 0.08% in words.


title: Z

text: stands for a voiced alveolar or voiced dental sibilant , in Albanian, Breton, Czech, Dutch, French, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, and the International Phonetic Alphabet. It stands for in Chinese pinyin and Jyutping, Finnish (occurs in loanwords only), and German, and is likewise expressed in Old Norse. In Italian, it represents two phonemes, and . In Portuguese, it stands for in most cases, but also for or (depending on the regional variant) at the end of syllables. In Basque, it represents the sound .


title: Z

text: Castilian Spanish uses the letter to represent (as English in "thing"), though in other dialects (Latin American, Andalusian) this sound has merged with . Before voiced consonants, the sound is voiced to or , sometimes debbucalized to (as in the surname "Guzmán" , or ). This is the only context in which can represent a voiced sibilant in Spanish, though also represents (or , depending on the dialect) in this environment.


title: Z

text: In Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, usually stands for the sound /s/ and thus shares the value of ; it normally occurs only in loanwords that are spelt with in the source languages.


title: Z

text: The letter on its own represents in Polish. It is also used in four of the seven officially recognized digraphs: (), ( or ), ( or , sometimes it represents a sequence ) and (), and is the most frequently used of the consonants in that language. (Other Slavic languages avoid digraphs and mark the corresponding phonemes with the (caron) diacritic: , , , ; this system has its origin in Czech orthography of the Hussite period.) can also appear with diacritical marks, namely and , which are used to represent the sounds and . They also appear in the digraphs ( or ) and ( or ).


title: Z

text: Hungarian uses in the digraphs (expressing , as opposed to the value of , which is ), and (expressing ). The letter on its own represents .


title: Z

text: In Modern Scots is used in place of the obsolete letter (yogh) and should be pronounced as a hard 'g'. Whilst there are a few common nouns which use in this manner, such as (pronounced 'brulgey' meaning broil), z as a yogh substitute is more common in people's names and place-names. Often the names are mispronounced to follow the apparent English spelling so Mackenzie is commonly pronounced with a 'z' sound. Menzies, however, still retains the correct pronunciation of 'Mingus'.


title: Z

text: Among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet, usually stands for , such as in Azerbaijani, Igbo, Indonesian, Shona, Swahili, Tatar, Turkish, and Zulu. represents in Northern Sami and Inari Sami. In Turkmen, represents .


title: Z

text: In the Nihon-shiki, Kunrei-shiki, and Hepburn romanisations of Japanese, stands for a phoneme whose allophones include and . Additionally, in the Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki systems, is used to represent that same phoneme before , where it's pronounced .


title: Z

text: A graphical variant of is , which has been adopted into the International Phonetic Alphabet as the sign for the voiced postalveolar fricative.


title: Z

text: In mathematics, is used to denote the set of integers. Originally, formula_1 was just a handwritten version of the bold capital Z used in printing but, over time, it has come to be used more frequently in printed works too.


title: Z

text: In chemistry, the letter "Z" is used to denote the Atomic number of an element (number of protons), such as "Z"=3 for Lithium.


title: Z

text: Z has been used as a military symbol by Russian forces during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russian civilians have used it in support of their government.


title: Z

text: On the QWERTZ keyboard used in Central Europe the Z replaces the Y of the standard US/UK QWERTY keyboard as the sixth letter of the first row.


title: Coinbase

text: Coinbase Global, Inc., branded Coinbase, is an American publicly traded company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform. Coinbase is a distributed company; all employees operate via remote work and the company lacks a physical headquarters. It is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States by trading volume. The company was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam. In May 2020, Coinbase announced it would shut its San Francisco, California headquarters and change operations to remote-first, part of a wave of several major tech companies closing headquarters in San Francisco in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Coinbase

text: Coinbase was founded in June 2012 by Brian Armstrong, a former Airbnb engineer. Armstrong enrolled in the Y Combinator startup incubator program and received a $150,000 cash infusion. Fred Ehrsam, a former Goldman Sachs trader, later joined as a co-founder after noticing Armstrong's posts on Reddit. British programmer and Blockchain.info co-founder Ben Reeves was originally supposed to be part of the Coinbase founding team but parted ways with Armstrong just before the Y Combinator funding event, due to their different stands on how the Coinbase wallet should operate. The company is named after coinbase transactions, which are special transactions that introduce cryptocurrency into circulation in proof of work cryptocurrencies. In October 2012, the company launched the services to buy and sell bitcoins through bank transfers.


title: Coinbase

text: In May 2013, the company received a US$5 million Series A investment led by Fred Wilson from the venture capital firm Union Square Ventures. In December the same year, the company received a US$25 million investment, from the venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures (USV), and Ribbit Capital. Olaf Carlson-Wee, a graduate from Vassar College, was hired as the first employee in the same year.


title: Coinbase

text: In 2014, the company grew to one million users, acquired the blockchain explorer service Blockr and the web bookmarking company Kippt, secured insurance covering the value of bitcoin stored on their servers, and launched the vault system for secure bitcoin storage. Throughout 2014, the company also partnered with Overstock, Dell, Expedia, Dish Network, and Time Inc. allowing those firms to accept bitcoin payments. In the same year, company also added bitcoin payment processing capabilities to the traditional payment companies Stripe, Braintree, and PayPal. In January 2014, Coinbase Global, Inc. was incorporated in Delaware as a holding company for Coinbase and its subsidiaries. The corporate reorganization that saw Coinbase become a subsidiary of Coinbase Global was completed in April that year.


title: Coinbase

text: In January 2015, the company received a US$75 million investment, led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the New York Stock Exchange, USAA, and several banks. Later in January, the company launched a U.S.-based bitcoin exchange for professional traders called Coinbase Exchange. In September, Coinbase began to offer services in Canada and Singapore.


title: Coinbase

text: In May 2016, the company rebranded the Coinbase Exchange, changing the name to Global Digital Asset Exchange (GDAX). In July, they added retail support for Ether. Also in July, they announced they would halt services in August after the closure of Canadian online payments service provider Vogogo.


title: Coinbase

text: In January and then March 2017, Coinbase obtained the BitLicense and licensed to trade in Ethereum and Litecoin from the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS). In November, Coinbase was ordered by the US Internal Revenue Service to report any users who had at least $20,000 in transactions in a year. On December 19, Coinbase listed Bitcoin Cash, and the Coinbase platform experienced price abnormalities that led to an insider trading investigation.


title: Coinbase

text: On February 23, 2018, Coinbase told approximately 13,000 affected customers that the company would be providing their taxpayer ID, name, birth date, address, and historical transaction records from 2013 to 2015 to the IRS within 21 days. In March, Coinbase appointed Emilie Choi, a former LinkedIn executive, as Vice President of Corporate and Business Development. She was promoted to the role of president and chief operating officer in May 2019. On March 26, 2018, Coinbase announced their intention to add support for ERC-20 tokens. On April 5, 2018, Coinbase announced that it had formed an early-stage venture fund, Coinbase Ventures, focusing on investment into blockchain- and cryptocurrency-related companies. On May 16, Coinbase Ventures announced its first investment in Compound Labs, a start-up building Ethereum smart contracts similar to money markets. On May 23, GDAX was rebranded as Coinbase Pro. Also in May, Coinbase launched Prime, a platform dedicated to institutional customers. In August, Amazon cloud executive Tim Wagner joined Coinbase as vice president of engineering. In September, Coinbase, along with Circle and Bitcoin miner company Bitmain, was part of a consortium called Centre that launched a digital coin called USD Coin, pegged to the US dollar.


title: Coinbase

text: In January 2019, Coinbase stopped all trading on Ethereum Classic due to a suspicion of an attack on the network. In February, Coinbase announced that it had acquired "blockchain intelligence platform" Neutrino, an Italy-based startup, for an undisclosed price. The acquisition raised concern among some Coinbase users based on Neutrino founders' connection to the Hacking Team, which has been accused of providing internet surveillance technology to governments with poor human rights records. On March 4, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said his company "did not properly evaluate" the deal from a due diligence perspective and thus any Neutrino staff who previously worked at Hacking Team "will transition out of Coinbase." In April, a UK corporate filing stated that Coinbase's non-U.S. revenue grew 20% to €153 million (U.S.$173 million) in 2018 resulting in a net profit of €6.6 million. Coinbase UK CEO Zeeshan Feroz said the company's non-U.S. operations accounted for nearly one-third of the company's overall revenue and Reuters estimated that the company's global revenue totaled "around $520 million" in 2018. In August, Coinbase announced that it was targeted by a sophisticated hacking attack attempt in mid-June. This reported attack used spear-phishing and social engineering tactics (including sending fake e-mails from compromised email accounts and created a landing page at the University of Cambridge) and two Firefox browser zero-day vulnerabilities. One of the Firefox vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to escalate privileges from JavaScript on a browser page () and the second one could allow the attacker to escape the browser sandbox and execute code on the host computer (). Coinbase's security team detected and blocked the attack, the network was not compromised, and no cryptocurrency was stolen.


title: Coinbase

text: In May 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the company announced it was shifting completely to remote work and would no longer recognize a formal headquarters. Also in May, the company announced the acquisition of New York-based digital asset trading firm Tagomi for a price between $75 and $100 million. In June, Coinbase received internal backlash after CEO Brian Armstrong initially refused to make a statement about Black Lives Matter, citing the company's apolitical culture, but Armstrong later reversed his course on Twitter. In September, Armstrong published a blog post emphasizing that Coinbase would not engage in social activism, citing that such activism had hurt other technology firms such as Google and Facebook, and offered a severance package for those who disagreed with this direction. The company also faced complaints by employees saying they were treated unfairly due to their race or gender. In October, Coinbase announced the launch of a Visa debit card program. In December, the "New York Times" reported that based upon data up to 2018 (already two years old as of date of publication) women at Coinbase were paid an average of 8% less than men at comparable jobs and ranks within the company, and Black employees were paid 7% less than those in similar roles.


title: Coinbase

text: In March 2021, the company fell under review by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, with concerns that the company may have provided their blockchain service to blacklisted individuals or companies, noting that the nature of blockchain technology makes it "technically infeasible" to prevent specific users from making transactions.


title: Coinbase

text: In March 2021, the company agreed to pay $6.5 million to settle regulatory claims that it had reported misleading information about its trading volumes. Also in March, Coinbase announced that it was establishing a business presence in India and hiring employees for IT services, including engineering, software development and customer support operations. The company also announced plans to open a physical office in Hyderabad.


title: Coinbase

text: In April 2021, with its final earnings release before its April 14 direct listing, the company reported a nine-fold increase in Q1 revenue, to $1.8B, up from $190.6M the previous year. The jump was attributed to the increase in the price of Bitcoin over that time period.


title: Coinbase

text: On April 14, 2021, Coinbase became a public company on the Nasdaq exchange via a direct stock listing. Before the listing, Nasdaq set a reference price of $250.00 a share, giving the company an estimated value of $47 billion. At the end of its first day of trading, Coinbase closed at a price of $328.28 per share. In May, the company's Chief People Officer published a blog post announcing that Coinbase was eliminating salary and equity negotiations during recruiting, citing salary disparities with women and minorities. The announcement said that "all employees in the same position, in the same location, receive the same salary and equity offer." In June, Coinbase added Dogecoin to its tradable assets for Coinbase Pro users. In September, the Securities and Exchange Commission reportedly threatened to sue Coinbase if the company decided to launch a cryptocurrency lending product called Lend. The company initially responded in a blog post that it was confused for being singled out by the SEC, but later announced it had canceled the planned launch. Technology publication TechCrunch covered the story and noted the existence of similar cryptocurrency lending products already on the market. In November, Coinbase made its first acquisition in India by purchasing AI-powered support platform Agara for an estimated $40–50 million. The company stated that it would utilize Agara's technology to automate its customer experience tools.


title: Coinbase

text: On December 15 a display glitch vastly inflated balances such that numerous users were apparently, albeit briefly, trillionaires.


title: Coinbase

text: Coinbase's 60 second commercial during Super Bowl LVI achieved viral status and was considered to be the most effective of any commercial during the game. The ad, credited to Accenture Interactive, cost $217,000 per second (or $13 million) and featured only a black, screensaver-like screen with a bouncing color changing QR code. The code directed users to a web page advertising a $15 in free Bitcoin for new accounts plus entry into a promotion for a sweepstakes to win 3 $1 million prizes for Bitcoin. The low tech image evoked the retro look of the old DVD screensaver logo bouncing around the screen.


title: Coinbase

text: The advertisement had no narration and only music. The influx of users caused Coinbase's website to crash. Coinbase's landing page received 20 million hits in one minute. Its iOS app jumped from #186 to #2 in overall downloads after the advertisement. The ad was parodied later in the night by Meta (which posted its own, similar ad on social media to advertise a streaming Foo Fighters concert after the game). Meta quipped "Hopefully this doesn't break." The Super Bowl which has been nicknamed the "Crypto Bowl" also featured commercials by Crypto.com, eToro, and FTX on the American telecast.


title: Coinbase

text: The Martin Agency CEO Kristen Cavallo criticized Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong for not acknowledging the role that agencies had played in the creation of the ad.


title: Coinbase

text: In response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Coinbase blocked 25,000 cryptocurrency wallet addresses related to Russia, believing them to have engaged in illicit activity.


title: Coinbase

text: Coinbase began operations in India in April 2022. The company initially relied on Unified Payments Interface to allow users to convert rupees to cryptocurrencies, but ceased using UPI after a statement released by the National Payments Corporation of India indicating it was "not aware of any crypto exchange using UPI". This statement forced Coinbase to suspend most of its business in India. Users in India cannot convert rupees into cryptocurrency, but can trade between different cryptocurrencies.


title: Coinbase

text: On June 14, 2022, the company announced it would be laying off approximately 18 percent of its workforce, about 1,100 full-time jobs, amid the global downturn in cryptocurrencies and services.


title: Coinbase

text: In August 2022, Coinbase announced a partnership with BlackRock. The venture allows BlackRock clients to use their Aladdin investment management system to oversee their exposure to Bitcoin along with other portfolio assets, and to facilitate trading on Coinbase's exchange.


title: Coinbase

text: Coinbase reported a net loss of $1.1 billion in the second quarter of 2022, a record for the company. In October 2022, Coinbase entered into a partnership with Google Cloud Platform that would allow the latter’s customers to pay for cloud services with cryptocurrencies supported by Coinbase Commerce. Coinbase also agreed to transfer its data-related applications from Amazon Web Services to Google Cloud.


title: Coinbase

text: Coinbase offers products for both retail and institutional cryptocurrency investors, as well as other related cryptocurrency products.


title: Coinbase

text: The company develops an application programming interface (API) for developers and merchants to build applications and accept payments in digital currencies.


title: Coinbase

text: Coinbase operates as a remote-first company and has no physical headquarters. As part of its SEC filing to go public, the company reported 43 million verified users, 7,000 institutions, and 115,000 ecosystem partners in over 100 countries. It also reported net revenue of $1.14 billion in 2020, up from $483 million the previous year. The company also reported a net income of $322 million after posting a loss in 2019. Out of the $782 billion worth of assets on the crypto market, some $90 billion worth is held on the Coinbase platform.


title: Coinbase

text: , the company offered buy/sell trading functionality in 32 countries, while the cryptocurrency wallet was available in 190 countries worldwide.


title: Coinbase

text: In a May 2022 Form 10-Q filing, Coinbase stated that "because custodially held crypto assets may be considered to be the property of a bankruptcy estate, in the event of a bankruptcy, the crypto assets we hold in custody on behalf of our customers could be subject to bankruptcy proceedings and such customers could be treated as our general unsecured creditors".


title: Coinbase

text: The "Coinbase Effect" refers to the rise in price of cryptocurrencies listed for sale on a dominant crypto exchange such as Coinbase in the days after the news becomes public. According to "Barron's", the effect of getting a cryptocurrency listed on the exchange plays a big role in what cryptocurrencies gain widespread acceptance.


title: Coinbase

text: On February 16, 2018, Coinbase admitted that some customers were overcharged in error for credit and debit purchases of cryptocurrencies. The problem was initiated when banks and card issuers changed the merchant category code (MCC) for cryptocurrency purchases earlier that month. This meant that cryptocurrency payments would now be processed as "cash advances", meaning that banks and credit card issuers could begin charging customers cash advance fees for cryptocurrency purchases. Customers who purchased cryptocurrency on their exchange between January 22 and February 11, 2018, could have been affected. At first, Visa blamed Coinbase, telling the "Financial Times" on February 16 that it had "not made any systems changes that would result in the duplicate transactions cardholders are reporting." However, the latest statement from Visa and Worldpay on the Coinbase blog clarifies: "This issue was not caused by Coinbase."


title: Coinbase

text: In March 2018, "Quartz" reported that the number of monthly customer complaints against Coinbase jumped more than 100% in January of that year, to 889, citing official Consumer Financial Protection Bureau data, with more than 400 of those categorized as "money was not available when promised". The article also noted that the company was subsequently increasing its customer service staff to reduce wait times.


title: Coinbase

text: In December 2021, CNBC reported that Coinbase froze the cryptocurrency GYEN due to a sudden price spike, resulting in many traders losing money.


title: Coinbase

text: On July 22, 2022, a former Coinbase product manager, Ishan Wahi, along with Nikhil Wahi (Ishan's brother) and Sameer Ramani (a friend), was charged in the first-ever insider trading case in cryptocurrency by prosecutors for the Southern District of New York and the Securities and Exchange Commission. According to the complaint filed in "SEC v. Wahi," Ishan Wahi allegedly shared information that certain tokens were about to be listed by Coinbase with Nikhil Wahi and Ramani, who then allegedly acted upon that information to make trades for an alleged illicit profit in excess of $1.5 million. According to federal prosecutors, Ishan Wahi purchased a one-way ticket to India upon being summoned by Coinbase to the company's Seattle office for a meeting. Wahi was subsequently intercepted by law enforcement from boarding a May 16 flight to India. Coinbase's chief security officer, Philip Martin, noted that the company provided prosecutors with information from an internal investigation.


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: Jeffrey Michael Tambor (born July 8, 1944) is an American actor. He is known for his television roles such as Jeffrey Brookes, the uptight neighbor of Stanley and Helen Roper in the television sitcom "The Ropers" (1979–1980), as Hank Kingsley on "The Larry Sanders Show" (1992–1998), George Bluth Sr. and Oscar Bluth on "Arrested Development" (2003–2006, 2013, 2018–2019) and Maura Pfefferman on "Transparent" (2014–2017). For his role in the latter, Tambor earned two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series out of three nominations. In 2015, he was also awarded a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Pfefferman.


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: His film roles include Jay Porter in "...And Justice for All" (1979), Jinx Latham in "Mr. Mom" (1983), Sully in "There's Something About Mary" (1998), Mayor Augustus Maywho in "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" (2000), Tom Manning in "Hellboy" (2004) and its sequel "" (2008), Sid Garner in "The Hangover" trilogy (2009–2013), Francis Silverberg in "The Accountant" (2016), and Georgy Malenkov in "The Death of Stalin" (2017).


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: Tambor has done voice acting for "The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie" (2004), "Monsters vs. Aliens" (2009), "Tangled" (2010), and "Trolls" (2016). For his voice role in "The Lionhearts" (1998), he was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award. From 2002 to 2003, he was an announcer for "Hollywood Squares".


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: Tambor was born on July 8, 1944 in San Francisco, California, the son of Eileen (born Salzberg), a homemaker, and Bernard Tambor, a flooring contractor. He grew up in a Conservative Jewish family with roots in Hungary and Ukraine. Tambor is a graduate of Abraham Lincoln High School and San Francisco State University, where he studied acting and then went on to receive a master's degree from Wayne State University.


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: Tambor first moved to repertory theater in Milwaukee, later making his Broadway debut in the comedy "Sly Fox" (1976), appearing with George C. Scott and directed by Arthur Penn. He appeared in "Measure for Measure" in the same year. In 1979, he starred in Norman Jewison's "...And Justice For All", as a lawyer friend of the protagonist, Arthur Kirkland (Al Pacino). In an early TV job, an ad for Avis rent-a-car, he was seen running (huffing and puffing) through an airport, mocking O. J. Simpson's "Go, O.J., go!" ads for Hertz. He has had a significant career in episodic TV, where he made numerous guest appearances on different shows, including "Taxi", "Kojak", "M*A*S*H", "The Golden Girls", and "Three's Company". In 1979, Tambor got his first role as a main character in television in the short-lived show "The Ropers". Throughout the 1980s Tambor had a recurring role on "Hill Street Blues" playing a defense attorney who eventually becomes a judge. In 1981, he appeared in an episode of "Barney Miller" as a man who was trying to bring exposure to the members of the Trilateral Commission in charge of the coming New World Order. In 1987, and 1988, Tambor appeared as a regular on the prime time ABC series "Max Headroom" as Murray, Edison's editor. In 1990, he appeared in the music video for the Phil Collins song "I Wish It Would Rain Down".


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: Tambor played Hank Kingsley, the narcissistic sidekick of fictional talk show host Larry Sanders on "The Larry Sanders Show". Tambor received four Emmy nominations for his performance on the show—all of which he would lose, to Michael Richards for "Seinfeld", David Hyde Pierce for "Frasier", and his co-star Rip Torn. The character's famous catch phrase was "Hey Now!".


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: Beginning in 2003, Tambor starred in the television comedy "Arrested Development" as George Bluth, Sr. and in some episodes as his twin brother Oscar Bluth. The show was cancelled in 2006, after three seasons, but a fourth season was released on Netflix in 2013.


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: In 2004, Tambor received his fifth Emmy nomination for his work on the show. He lost to David Hyde Pierce for the final season of the sitcom "Frasier". Tambor was nominated for a sixth time in 2005 but lost to Brad Garrett for the final season of "Everybody Loves Raymond". The second episode of "Arrested Development"<nowiki>'s third season lampooned this loss: Tambor's character's son describes his acting ability by saying, "It's a wonderful performance, Dad. You're a regular Brad Garrett."</nowiki>


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: Tambor served as the announcer (and occasional square) for the game show "Hollywood Squares" in 2002 and 2003. He was the voice of King Neptune in 2004's "The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie". In the spring of 2005, he starred as George Aaronow in the Broadway revival of "Glengarry Glen Ross".


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: After the cancellation of "Arrested Development" in April 2006, Tambor signed on to a series with John Lithgow called "Twenty Good Years" about two men who ponder the last 20 years of their life. The show premiered on NBC on October 11, 2006, but was taken off the air after only a few episodes. Also in 2006, he portrayed George Washington on "The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd". He starred as "Uncle" Saul in the CBS comedy "Welcome to The Captain" until its cancellation in March 2008. He has made several cameo appearances on "Entourage" as a fictionalized version of himself who regularly annoys his agent, Ari Gold.


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: For several years, based on his availability, Tambor has taught a class for actors. He was a longtime teaching associate of acting coach Milton Katselas.


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: In 2009, Tambor appeared in the animated film "Monsters vs. Aliens" and in the comedy "The Hangover". In 2009, Tambor began playing the recurring character Len Trexler in the sardonic comedy "Archer", an animated television series on the FX network. He is a major love interest to Malory Archer played by Jessica Walter – the two formerly playing husband and wife in "Arrested Development".


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: Tambor replaced Kelsey Grammer as Georges in the Broadway revival of the musical "La Cage aux Folles" on February 15, 2011, but withdrew from the production after the February 24 performance. Also in 2011, Tambor starred in an indie comedy, "Lucky". That same year, he had a minor role in the film "Paul" with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, reprised his "Hangover" role for its sequel, and was featured in "Flypaper", with Patrick Dempsey and Ashley Judd.


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: In 2012, Tambor co-starred as Walt, Pete's aspiring musician father on the sitcom "Bent" starring Amanda Peet and David Walton. In May 2013 he returned to "Arrested Development" for season 4 and subsequently, season 5 in 2018–2019.


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: In February 2014, Amazon premiered its original series "Transparent", which starred Tambor as Maura Pfefferman (born Morton Pfefferman), a divorced transgender Jewish parent of three. Tambor won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Television Series – Musical or Comedy for his portrayal and thanked the transgender community in his speech. He won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series for his performance in season 1 of the show, his first win in 7 Primetime Emmy Award nominations. This made him the first actor to win an Emmy for portraying a transgender character.


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: For the show's second season, Tambor again received positive reviews, as well as a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Musical or Comedy, and wins for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Comedy Series and the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Actor in a Comedy Series.


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: Following allegations of sexual harassment, Tambor said he would not return for the show's fifth season, which was later confirmed on February 15, 2018, when Amazon confirmed to "Deadline" that Tambor was not coming back and that the harassment investigation was recently concluded.


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: On November 8, 2017, Tambor was accused of sexual misconduct by his former assistant, Van Barnes. On November 16, 2017, actress Trace Lysette additionally made accusations against Tambor. Tambor responded, "I am deeply sorry if any action of mine was ever misinterpreted by anyone as being sexually aggressive or if I ever offended or hurt anyone. But the fact is, for all my flaws, I am not a predator and the idea that someone might see me in that way is more distressing than I can express." Days later, makeup artist Tamara Delbridge also accused Tambor of sexual improprieties on the set of the 2001 film "Never Again". Tambor said he did not recall the incident, but apologized "for any discomfort or offense I may have inadvertently caused her."


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: By this time, Tambor had left "Transparent", saying in a statement on November 19, "Playing Maura Pfefferman on "Transparent" has been one of the greatest privileges and creative experiences of my life. What has become clear over the past weeks, however, is that this is no longer the job I signed up for four years ago. I've already made clear my deep regret if any action of mine was ever misinterpreted by anyone as being aggressive, but the idea that I would deliberately harass anyone is simply and utterly untrue. Given the politicized atmosphere that seems to have afflicted our set, I don't see how I can return to "Transparent"." The allegations came after filming for the fifth season of "Arrested Development" had completed that same month. The show's team supported Tambor in his defense against the allegations and his scenes remained within the show.


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: In his first interview after leaving "Transparent", Tambor, speaking to "The Hollywood Reporter" in May 2018, continued to deny allegations that he had sexually harassed his former assistant or Trace Lysette on the series, but admitted to having anger issues throughout his life. He also said that while he was on the show he "worried [himself] to death" about whether he was portraying his transgender character truthfully, and that the stress sometimes made him "difficult" and "mean". Tambor mentioned one "blowup" he had with "Arrested Development" co-star Jessica Walter during the show's production. On May 23, 2018, Walter said in a "New York Times" cast interview that Tambor had verbally harassed her. "He never crossed the line on our show with any, you know, sexual whatever. Verbally, yes, he harassed me, but he did apologize ... In like almost 60 years of working, I've never had anybody yell at me like that on a set." When asked whether she had reservations about working with Tambor again, Walter said, "Of course not." "I don't want to walk around with anger," she added. "I respect him as an actor. We've known each other for years and years and years. Of course, I would work with him again in a heartbeat."


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: Tambor and his wife Kasia have a son Gabriel Kasper, younger daughter Eve Julia, and twin sons Hugo Bernard and Eli Nicholas, born on October 4, 2009. He has an adult daughter from an earlier relationship.


title: Jeffrey Tambor

text: In 2007, Tambor was reported to be a Scientologist. However, in February 2008, he expressed concern about "Internet reports" about his alleged involvement with Scientology and stated that he "took some Scientology classes at one time, studied Scientology for a while, but no more. I have nothing against it, but I am no longer a Scientologist."


title: Panama Papers

text: The Panama Papers () are 11.5 million leaked documents (or 2.6 terabytes of data) that were published beginning on April 3, 2016. The papers detail financial and attorney–client information for more than 214,488 offshore entities. The documents, some dating back to the 1970s, were created by, and taken from, former Panamanian offshore law firm and corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca.


title: Panama Papers

text: The documents contain personal financial information about wealthy individuals and public officials that had previously been kept private. The publication of these documents made it possible to establish the prosecution of Jan Marsalek, who is still a person of interest to a number of European governments due to his revealed links with Russian intelligence, and international financial fraudsters David and Josh Baazov. While offshore business entities are legal (see Offshore Magic Circle), reporters found that some of the Mossack Fonseca shell corporations were used for illegal purposes, including fraud, tax evasion, and evading international sanctions.


title: Panama Papers

text: "John Doe", the whistleblower who leaked the documents to German journalist Bastian Obermayer from the newspaper "Süddeutsche Zeitung" ("SZ"), remains anonymous, even to the journalists who worked on the investigation. "My life is in danger", the whistleblower told them. In a May 6, 2016 document, John Doe cited income inequality as the reason for the action and said the documents were leaked "simply because I understood enough about their contents to realize the scale of the injustices they described". Doe had never worked for any government or intelligence agency and expressed willingness to help prosecutors if granted immunity from prosecution. After "SZ" verified that the statement did in fact come from the source for the Panama Papers, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) posted the full document on its website.


title: Panama Papers

text: "SZ" asked the ICIJ for help because of the amount of data involved. Journalists from 107 media organizations in 80 countries analyzed documents detailing the operations of the law firm. After more than a year of analysis, the first news stories were published on April 3, 2016, along with 150 of the documents themselves. The project represents an important milestone in the use of data journalism software tools and mobile collaboration.


title: Panama Papers

text: The documents were dubbed the Panama Papers because of the country they were leaked from, but the Panamanian government expressed strong objections to the name over concerns that it would tarnish the government's and country's image worldwide, as did other entities in Panama and elsewhere. Some media outlets covering the story have used the name "Mossack Fonseca papers".


title: Panama Papers

text: In October 2020, German authorities issued an international arrest warrant for the two founders of the law firm at the core of the tax evasion scandal exposed by the Panama Papers. Cologne prosecutors are seeking German-born Jürgen Mossack and Panamanian Ramón Fonseca on charges of accessory to tax evasion and forming a criminal organization.


title: Panama Papers

text: In addition to the much-covered business dealings of British prime minister David Cameron and Icelandic prime minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, the leaked documents also contain identity information about the shareholders and directors of 214,000 shell companies set up by Mossack Fonseca, as well as some of their financial transactions. Although it is generally not against the law to own an offshore shell company, reporters found that some of the shell corporations were used for illegal purposes, including fraud, tax evasion, and evading international sanctions.


title: Panama Papers

text: The journalists on the investigative team found business transactions by many important figures in world politics, sports, and art. While many of the transactions were legal, since the data is incomplete, questions remain in many other cases; still others seem to clearly indicate ethical if not legal impropriety. Some disclosures – tax avoidance in very poor countries by very wealthy entities and individuals for example – led to questions on moral grounds. For example, the shell company Octea is registered to Beny Steinmetz and owes more than US$700,000 in property taxes to the city of Koidu in Sierra Leone, and is $150 million in debt, even though its exports were more than twice that in an average month in the 2012–2015 period. Steinmetz himself has a personal worth of $6 billion.


title: Panama Papers

text: Other offshore shell company transactions described in the documents do seem to have broken exchange laws, violated trade sanctions or stemmed from political corruption, according to ICIJ reporters. For example:


title: Panama Papers

text: Named in the leak were 12 current or former world leaders; 128 other public officials and politicians; and hundreds of celebrities, businessmen, and other wealthy individuals of over 200 countries.


title: Panama Papers

text: Individuals and entities may open offshore accounts for any number of reasons, some of which are legal. A Canadian lawyer based in Dubai noted, for example, that businesses might wish to avoid falling under Islamic inheritance jurisprudence if an owner dies. Businesses in some countries may wish to hold some of their funds in dollars also, said a Brazilian lawyer. Estate planning is another example of legal tax avoidance.


title: Panama Papers

text: American film-maker Stanley Kubrick had an estimated personal worth of $20 million when he died in 1999, much of it invested in an 18th-century English manor he bought in 1978. He lived in that manor for the rest of his life, filming scenes from "The Shining", "Full Metal Jacket," and "Eyes Wide Shut" there as well. Three holding companies set up by Mossack Fonseca now own the property, and are in turn held by trusts set up for his children and grandchildren. Since Kubrick was an American living in Britain, without the trust his estate would have had to pay transfer taxes to both governments and possibly have been forced to sell the property to obtain the liquid assets to pay them. Kubrick is buried on the grounds along with one of his daughters, and the rest of his family still lives there.


title: Panama Papers

text: Other uses are more ambiguous. Chinese companies may incorporate offshore in order to raise foreign capital, normally against the law in China. In some of the world's hereditary dictatorships, the law may be on the side of the elite who use offshore companies to award oil contracts to themselves, or gold concessions to their children, however such dealings are sometimes prosecuted under international law.


title: Panama Papers

text: While no standard official definition exists, "The Economist" and the International Monetary Fund describe an offshore financial center, or tax haven, as a jurisdiction whose banking infrastructure primarily provides services to people or businesses who do not live there, requires little or no disclosure of information when doing business, and offers low taxes.


title: Panama Papers

text: "The most obvious use of offshore financial centers is to avoid taxes", "The Economist" added. Oxfam blamed tax havens in its 2016 annual report on income inequality for much of the widening gap between rich and poor. "Tax havens are at the core of a global system that allows large corporations and wealthy individuals to avoid paying their fair share," said Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, "depriving governments, rich and poor, of the resources they need to provide vital public services and tackle rising inequality."


title: Panama Papers

text: International Monetary Fund (IMF) researchers estimated in July 2015 that profit shifting by multinational companies costs developing countries around US$213 billion a year, almost two percent of their national income. Igor Angelini, head of Europol's Financial Intelligence Group, said that shell companies "play an important role in large-scale money laundering activities" and that they are often a means to "transfer bribe money". Tax Justice Network concluded in a 2012 report that "designing commercial tax abuse schemes and turning a blind eye upon suspicious transactions have become an inherent part of the work of bankers and accountants".


title: Panama Papers

text: Money-laundering affects the first world as well, since a favored shell company investment is real estate in Europe and North America. London, Miami, New York, Paris, Vancouver and San Francisco have all been affected. The practice of parking assets in luxury real estate has been frequently cited as fueling skyrocketing housing prices in Miami, where the Miami Association of Realtors said that cash sales accounted for 90% of new home sales in 2015. "There is a huge amount of dirty money flowing into Miami that's disguised as investment," according to former congressional investigator Jack Blum. In Miami, 76% of condo owners pay cash, a practice considered a red flag for money-laundering.


title: Panama Papers

text: Real estate in London, where housing prices increased 50% from 2007 to 2016, also is frequently purchased by overseas investors. Donald Toon, head of Britain's National Crime Agency, said in 2015 that "the London property market has been skewed by laundered money. Prices are being artificially driven up by overseas criminals who want to sequester their assets here in the UK". Three quarters of Londoners under 35 cannot afford to buy a home.


title: Panama Papers

text: Andy Yan, an urban planning researcher and adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia, studied real estate sales in Vancouver—also thought to be affected by foreign purchasers—found that 18% of the transactions in Vancouver's most expensive neighborhoods were cash purchases, and 66% of the owners appeared to be Chinese nationals or recent arrivals from China. Calls for more data on foreign investors have been rejected by the provincial government. Chinese nationals accounted for 70% of 2014 Vancouver home sales for more than CA$3 million. On June 24, 2016 China CITIC Bank Corp filed suit in Canada against a Chinese citizen who borrowed CN¥50 million for his lumber business in China, but then withdrew roughly CA$7.5 million from the line of credit and left the country. He bought three houses in Vancouver and Surrey, British Columbia together valued at CA$7.3 million during a three-month period in June 2014.


title: Panama Papers

text: "This issue will surely be raised at the G20 summit," predicted Tomasz Kozlowski, Ambassador of the European Union (EU) to India. "We need to strengthen international cooperation for exchange of tax information between tax authorities".


title: Panama Papers

text: Panama, Vanuatu and Lebanon may find themselves on a list of uncooperative tax havens that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) re-activated in July 2016 at the request of G20 nations, warned "Le Monde", a French newspaper that participated in the investigation. Those three countries followed none of the OECD's three broad guidelines for international banking cooperation:


title: Panama Papers

text: The OECD, the G20, or the European Union could also institute another list for countries that are inadequate in more than one area. Countries meeting none of these criteria, such as Panama, Vanuatu and Lebanon, would go on the blacklist. Countries that meet only one criterion would go on the greylist. In April 2016, if this greylist had been in place it would have included nine countries: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahrain, Brunei, Dominica, Liberia, Nauru, Samoa, Tobago and the United Arab Emirates.


title: Panama Papers

text: The ICIJ helped organize the research and document review once "Süddeutsche Zeitung" (SZ) realized the scale of the work required to validate the authenticity of 2.6 terabytes of leaked data. They enlisted reporters and resources from "The Guardian", the BBC, "Le Monde", "SonntagsZeitung," "Falter", "La Nación", German broadcasters NDR and WDR, and Austrian broadcaster ORF, and eventually many others. Ultimately, "reporters at 100 news media outlets working in 25 languages had used the documents" to investigate individuals and organizations associated with Mossack Fonseca.


title: Panama Papers

text: Security factored into a number of project management considerations. Saying "My life is in danger", John Doe insisted that reporters communicate over encrypted channels only and agree that they would never meet face-to-face.


title: Panama Papers

text: SZ also had concerns about security, not only for their source, the leaked documents, and their data, but also for the safety of some of their partners in the investigation living under corrupt regimes who might not want their money-handling practices made public. They stored the data in a room with limited physical access on air gapped computers that were never connected to the Internet. "The Guardian" also limited access to its journalists' project work area. To make it even harder to sabotage the computers or steal their drives, SZ journalists made them more tamper-evident by painting the screws holding the drives in place with glitter nail polish.


title: Panama Papers

text: Reporters sorted the documents into a huge file structure containing a folder for each shell company, which held the associated emails, contracts, transcripts, and scanned documents Mossack Fonseca had generated while doing business with the company or administering it on a client's behalf. Some 4.8 million leaked files were emails, 3 million were database entries, 2.2 million PDFs, 1.2 million images, 320,000 text files, and 2242 files in other formats.


title: Panama Papers

text: Journalists indexed the documents using open software packages Apache Solr and Apache Tika, and accessed them by means of a custom interface built on top of Blacklight. "Süddeutsche Zeitung" reporters also used Nuix for this, which is proprietary software donated by an Australian company also named Nuix.


title: Panama Papers

text: Using Nuix, "Süddeutsche Zeitung" reporters performed optical character recognition (OCR) processing on the millions of scanned documents, converting the data they contained to searchable and machine-readable text. Most project reporters then used Neo4J and Linkurious to extract individual and corporate names from the documents for analysis, but some who had access to Nuix used it for this as well. Reporters cross-referenced the compiled lists of people against the processed documents, then analyzed the information, trying to connect people, roles, monetary flow, and structure legality.


title: Panama Papers

text: US banking and SEC expert David P. Weber assisted journalists in reviewing information from the Panama Papers.


title: Panama Papers

text: Additional stories were released based on this data, and the full list of companies was released in early May 2016. The ICIJ later announced the release on May 9, 2016 of a searchable database containing information on over 200,000 offshore entities implicated in the Panama Papers investigation and more than 100,000 additional companies implicated in the 2013 Offshore Leaks investigation. Mossack Fonseca asked the ICIJ not to publish the leaked documents from its database. "We have sent a cease and desist letter," the company said in a statement.


title: Panama Papers

text: The sheer quantity of leaked data greatly exceeds the WikiLeaks Cablegate leak in 2010 (1.7 GB), Offshore Leaks in 2013 (260 GB), the 2014 Lux Leaks (4 GB), and the 3.3 GB Swiss Leaks of 2015. For comparison, the 2.6 TB of the Panama Papers equals approximately 2,660 GB.


title: Panama Papers

text: Mossack Fonseca notified its clients on April 1, 2016, that it had sustained an email hack. Mossack Fonseca also told news sources that the company had been hacked and always operated within the law.


title: Panama Papers

text: Data security experts noted, however, that the company had not been encrypting its emails and furthermore seemed to have been running a three-year-old version of Drupal with several known vulnerabilities. According to James Sanders of "TechRepublic", Drupal ran on the Apache 2.2.15 version from March 6, 2010, and worse, the Oracle fork of Apache, which by default allows users to view directory structure.


title: Panama Papers

text: The network architecture was also inherently insecure; the email and web servers were not segmented from the client database in any way.


title: Panama Papers

text: Some reports also suggest that some parts of the site may have been running WordPress with an out-of-date version of Slider Revolution, a plugin whose previously-announced vulnerabilities are well-documented.


title: Panama Papers

text: A grey hat hacker named 1×0123 announced April 12 that Mossack Fonseca's content management system had not been secured from SQL injection, a well-known database attack vector, and that he had been able to access the customer database because of this.


title: Panama Papers

text: Computer security expert Chris Kubecka announced May 24, 2016, that the Mossack Fonseca client login portal was running four different government grade remote access trojans (RATs). Kubecka confirmed there were still numerous critical vulnerabilities, too many open ports into their infrastructure and internet access to their archive server due to weak security. Kubecka explained how each data security issue was discovered in detail in a book titled "Down the Rabbit Hole: An OSINT Journey".


title: Panama Papers

text: Gerard Ryle, director of the ICIJ, called the leak "probably the biggest blow the offshore world has ever taken because of the extent of the documents". Edward Snowden described the release in a Twitter message as the "biggest leak in the history of data journalism". The ICIJ also said that the leak was "likely to be one of the most explosive [leaks of inside information in history] in the nature of its revelations".


title: Panama Papers

text: "This is a unique opportunity to test the effectiveness of leaktivism", said Micah White, co-founder of Occupy, "... the Panama Papers are being dissected via an unprecedented collaboration between hundreds of highly credible international journalists who have been working secretly for a year. This is the global professionalization of leaktivism. The days of WikiLeaks amateurism are over."


title: Panama Papers

text: WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic investigative journalist who worked on Cablegate in 2010, said withholding some documents for a time does maximise the leak's impact, but called for full online publication of the Panama Papers eventually. A tweet from WikiLeaks criticized the decision of the ICIJ to not release everything for ethical reasons: "If you censor more than 99% of the documents you are engaged in 1% journalism by definition."


title: Panama Papers

text: The whistleblower reported that the murder of journalists Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017 and the Ján Kuciak in 2018 due to their investigations of the Panama Papers had deeply affected him and called upon the European Union to deliver justice.


title: Panama Papers

text: While offshore business entities are not illegal in the jurisdictions where they are registered, and often not illegal at all, reporters found that some Mossack Fonseca shell corporations seem to have been used for illegal purposes including fraud, kleptocracy, tax evasion and evading international sanctions.


title: Panama Papers

text: Reports from April 3 note the law firm's many connections to high-ranking political figures and their relatives, as well as celebrities and business figures. Among other things, the leaked documents illustrate how wealthy individuals, including public officials, can keep personal financial information private.


title: Panama Papers

text: Initial reports identified five then-heads of state or government leaders from Argentina, Iceland, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates as well as government officials, close relatives, and close associates of various heads of government of more than forty other countries. Names of then-current national leaders in the documents include President Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, and the Prime Minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson.


title: Panama Papers

text: The leaked files identified 61 family members and associates of prime ministers, presidents and kings, including:


title: Panama Papers

text: Other clients included less-senior government officials and their close relatives and associates, from over forty countries.


title: Panama Papers

text: Over £10 million of cash from the sale of the gold stolen in the 1983 Brink's-Mat robbery was laundered, first unwittingly and later with the complicity of Mossack Fonseca, through a Panamanian company, Feberion Inc. The company was set up on behalf of an unnamed client twelve months after the robbery. The Brinks money was put through Feberion and other front companies, through banks in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Jersey, and the Isle of Man. It issued bearer shares only. Two nominee directors from Sark were appointed to Feberion by Jersey-based offshore specialist Centre Services. The offshore firms recycled the funds through land and property transactions in the United Kingdom. Although the Metropolitan Police Service raided the offices of Centre Services in late 1986 in cooperation with Jersey authorities, and seized papers and two Feberion bearer shares, it wasn't until 1995 that Brink's-Mat's solicitors were finally able to take control of Feberion and the assets.


title: Panama Papers

text: Actor Jackie Chan is mentioned in the leaked documents as a shareholder in six companies based in the British Virgin Islands.


title: Panama Papers

text: Law firms play a central role in offshore financial operations. Mossack Fonseca is one of the biggest in its field and the biggest financial institutions refer customers to it. Its services to clients include incorporating and operating shell companies in friendly jurisdictions on their behalf. They can include creating "complex shell company structures" that, while legal, also allow the firm's clients "to operate behind an often impenetrable wall of secrecy". The leaked papers detail some of their intricate, multilevel, and multinational corporate structures. Mossack Fonseca has acted with global consultancy partners like Emirates Asset Management Ltd, Ryan Mohanlal Ltd, Sun Hedge Invest and Blue Capital Ltd on behalf of more than 300,000 companies, most of them registered in the British Overseas Territories.


title: Panama Papers

text: Leaked documents also indicate that the firm would also backdate documents on request and, based on a 2007 exchange of emails in the leaked documents, it did so routinely enough to establish a price structure: $8.75 per month in the past. In 2008, Mossack Fonseca hired a 90-year-old British man to pretend to be the owner of the offshore company of Marianna Olszewski, a US businesswoman, "a blatant breach of anti-money laundering rules" according to the BBC.


title: Panama Papers

text: The anonymity of offshore shell companies can also be used to circumvent international sanctions, and more than 30 Mossack Fonseca clients were at one time or another blacklisted by the US Treasury Department, including businesses linked to senior figures in Russia, Syria and North Korea.


title: Panama Papers

text: Three Mossack Fonseca companies started for clients of Helene Mathieu Legal Consultants were later sanctioned by the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Pangates International Corporation was accused in July 2014 of supplying the government of Syria with "a large amount of specialty petroleum products" with "limited civilian application in Syria". The other two, Maxima Middle East Trading and Morgan Additives Manufacturing Co, and their owners Wael Abdulkarim and Ahmad Barqawi, were said to have "engaged in deceptive measures" to supply oil products to Syria.


title: Panama Papers

text: Mossack Fonseca also ran six businesses for Rami Makhlouf, cousin of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, despite US sanctions against him. Internal Mossack Fonseca documents show that in 2011 Mossack Fonseca rejected a recommendation by their own compliance team to sever ties to Mr. Makhlouf. They agreed to do so only months later. The firm has said it never knowingly allowed anyone connected with rogue regimes to use its companies.


title: Panama Papers

text: Frederik Obermaier, co-author of the Panama Papers story and an investigative reporter at the German newspaper "Süddeutsche Zeitung", told "Democracy Now": "Mossack Fonseca realised that Makhlouf was the cousin, and they realised that he was sanctioned, and they realised that he's allegedly one of the financiers of the Syrian regime. And they said, 'Oh, there is this bank who still does business with him, so we should still keep with him, as well'."


title: Panama Papers

text: HSBC also appeared to reassure Mossack Fonseca not only that it was "comfortable" with Makhlouf as a client but suggested there could be a rapprochement with the Assad family by the US. Makhlouf is already known to be a long-standing client of HSBC's Swiss private bank, holding at least $15 million with it in multiple accounts in 2006. The Panamanian files also show HSBC provided financial services to a Makhlouf company called Drex Technologies, which HSBC said was a company of "good standing".


title: Panama Papers

text: DCB Finance, a Virgin Islands-based shell company founded by North Korean banker Kim Chol-sam and British banker Nigel Cowie, also ignored international sanctions and continued to do business with North Korea with the help of the Panamanian firm. The US Treasury Department in 2013 called DCB Finance a front company for Daedong Credit Bank and announced sanctions against both companies for providing banking services to North Korean arms dealer Korea Mining and Development Trading Corporation, attempting to evade sanctions against that country, and helping to sell arms and expand North Korea's nuclear weapons programme. Cowie said the holding company was used for legitimate business and he was not aware of illicit transactions.


title: Panama Papers

text: Mossack Fonseca, required by international banking standards to avoid money-laundering or fraudster clients, is, like all banks, supposed to be particularly alert for signs of corruption with politically exposed persons (PEP), in other words, clients who either are or have close ties to government officials. However they somehow failed to turn up any red flags concerning Tareq Abbas even though he shares a family name with the president of Palestine, and sat on the board of directors of a company with four fellow directors the firm did deem PEP because of their ties to Palestinian politics. Yet Mossack Fonseca actually did and documented due diligence research, including a Google search.


title: Panama Papers

text: Mossack Fonseca has managed more than 300,000 companies over the years. The number of active companies peaked at more than 80,000 in 2009. Over 210,000 companies in twenty-one jurisdictions figure in the leaks. More than half were incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, with others in Panama, the Bahamas, the Seychelles, Niue, and Samoa. Mossack Fonseca's clients came from more than 100 countries. Most of the corporate clients were from Hong Kong, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Panama, and Cyprus. Mossack Fonseca worked with more than 14,000 banks, law firms, incorporators, and others to set up companies, foundations, and trusts for their clients. Some 3,100 companies listed in the database appear to have ties to US offshore specialists, and 3,500 shareholders of offshore companies list US addresses. Mossack Fonseca has offices in Nevada and Wyoming.


title: Panama Papers

text: The leaked documents indicate that about US$2 trillion has passed through the firm's hands. Several of the holding companies that appear in the documents did business with sanctioned entities, such as arms merchants and relatives of dictators, during the time that the sanctions were in place. The firm provided services to a Seychelles company named Pangates International, which the US government believes supplied aviation fuel to the Syrian government during the current civil war, and continued to handle its paperwork and certify it as a company in good standing, despite sanctions, until August 2015.


title: Panama Papers

text: More than 500 banks registered nearly 15,600 shell companies with Mossack Fonseca, with HSBC and its affiliates accounting for more than 2,300 of the total. Dexia and J. Safra Sarasin of Luxembourg, Credit Suisse from the Channel Islands and the Swiss UBS each requested at least 500 offshore companies for their clients. An HSBC spokesman said, "The allegations are historical, in some cases dating back 20 years, predating our significant, well-publicized reforms implemented over the last few years."


title: Panama Papers

text: In response to queries from the "Miami Herald" and ICIJ, Mossack Fonseca issued a 2,900-word statement listing legal requirements that prevent using offshore companies for tax avoidance and total anonymity, such as FATF protocols which require identifying ultimate beneficial owners of all companies (including offshore companies) before opening any account or transacting any business.


title: Panama Papers

text: The "Miami Herald" printed the statement with an editor's note that said the statement "did not address any of the specific due diligence failings uncovered by reporters".


title: Panama Papers

text: The facts are these: while we may have been the victim of a data breach, nothing we've seen in this illegally obtained cache of documents suggests we've done anything illegal, and that's very much in keeping with the global reputation we've built over the past 40 years of doing business the right way.


title: Panama Papers

text: Co-founder Ramón Fonseca Mora told CNN that the reports were false, full of inaccuracies and that parties "in many of the circumstances" cited by the ICIJ "are not and have never been clients of Mossack Fonseca". The firm provided longer statements to ICIJ.


title: Panama Papers

text: In its official statement April 6, Mossack Fonseca suggested that responsibility for any legal violations might lie with other institutions:


title: Panama Papers

text: approximately 90% of our clientele is professional clients ... who act as intermediaries and are regulated in the jurisdiction of their business. These clients are obliged to perform due diligence on their clients in accordance with the KYC and AML regulations to which they are subject.


title: Panama Papers

text: In an interview with "Bloomberg", Jürgen Mossack said: "The cat's out of the bag, so now we have to deal with the aftermath."


title: Panama Papers

text: He said the leak was not an "inside job"—the company had been hacked by servers based abroad. It filed a complaint with the Panamanian attorney general's office.


title: Panama Papers

text: On April 7, 2016 Mossack resigned from Panama's Council on Foreign Relations (Conarex), even though he was not officially serving at the time. His brother Peter Mossack still serves as honorary Consul of Panama, as he has since 2010.


title: Panama Papers

text: On May 5, 2016, Mossack Fonseca sent a cease and desist letter to the ICIJ in an attempt to stop the ICIJ from releasing the leaked documents from the Panama Papers scandal. Despite this, the ICIJ released the leaked documents on May 9, 2016.


title: Panama Papers

text: In March 2018, Mossack Fonseca announced it would close down due to damage caused by the Panama Papers scandal.


title: Panama Papers

text: In October 2019, "The Laundromat", a movie based on the events of the Panama Papers was released on the streaming service Netflix. Prior to this, Mossack and Fonseca issued a lawsuit in aim of preventing the release, citing defamation and potential damage to their rights of a fair trial by jury, should one begin. On July 17, 2019, the judge, based in Connecticut, refused the injunction citing lack of jurisdiction, and ordered the case be transferred to Los Angeles, California.


title: Panama Papers

text: At 5:00 am on April 3, as the news first broke, Ramón Fonseca Mora told television channel TVN he "was not responsible nor he had been accused in any tribunal".


title: Panama Papers

text: He said the firm was the victim of a hack and that he had no responsibility for what clients did with the offshore companies that they purchased from Mossack Fonseca, which were legal under Panamanian law. Later that day, the Independent Movement (MOVIN) called for calm, and expressed hope that the Panamanian justice system would not allow the culprits to go with impunity.


title: Panama Papers

text: By April 8, the government understood that media reports were addressing tax evasion and not attacking Panama. The then-president Varela met on Wednesday April 7, with CANDIF, a committee of representatives from different sectors of the Panamanian economy which includes the Chamber of Commerce, Chamber of Industry and Agriculture, the National Lawyers Association, the International Lawyers Association, the Banking Association and the Stock Exchange, and entered full crisis management mode. On the same day he announced the creation of a new judiciary tribunal and a high-level commission led by Nobel Prize Laureate Joseph Stiglitz. There were accusations that foreign forces were attacking Panama because of Panama's "stable and robust economy".


title: Panama Papers

text: Isabel Saint Malo de Alvarado, then-Vice President of Panama, said in an op-ed piece published April 21 in "The Guardian" that then-President Juan Carlos Varela and his administration have strengthened Panama's controls over money-laundering in the twenty months they had been in power, and that "Panama is setting up an independent commission, co-chaired by the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, to evaluate our financial system, determine best practices, and recommend measures to strengthen global financial and legal transparency. We expect its findings within the next six months, and will share the results with the international community."


title: Panama Papers

text: However, in early August 2016, Stiglitz resigned from the committee because he learned that the Panamanian government would not commit to making their final report public. He said that he had always "assumed" that the final report would be transparent.


title: Panama Papers

text: On April 8, then-President Varela denounced France's proposal to return Panama to a list of countries that did not cooperate with information exchange. Minister of the Presidency Alvaro Alemán categorically denied that Panama is a tax haven, and said the country would not be a scapegoat. Alemán said that talks with the French ambassador to Panama had begun.


title: Panama Papers

text: On April 25, a meeting of the Panamanian and French finance ministers resulted in an agreement under which Panama will provide information to France about French nationals with taxable assets in the country.


title: Panama Papers

text: The Minister of Economy and Finance of Panama, Dulcidio de la Guardia, formerly an offshore specialist at Mossack Fonseca competitor Morgan & Morgan, said the legal but often "murky" niche of establishing offshore accounts, firms and trusts make up "less than half a percentage point" of Panama's GDP. He appeared to suggest that the publication of the papers was an attack on Panama because of the high level of economic growth that the country had shown.


title: Panama Papers

text: Eduardo Morgan of the Panamanian firm Morgan & Morgan accused the OECD of starting the scandal to avoid competition from Panama with the interests of other countries. The Panama Papers affect the image of Panama in an unfair manner and have come to light not as the result of an investigation, but of a hack, said Adolfo Linares, president of the Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Agriculture of Panama (Cciap).


title: Panama Papers

text: The Colegio Nacional de Abogados de Panama (CNA) urged the government to sue. Political analyst Mario Rognoni said that the world perceives Panama as a tax haven. The government of then-President Juan Carlos Varela might become implicated if he tries to cover up for those involved, Rognoni said.


title: Panama Papers

text: Economist Rolando Gordon said the affair hurts Panama, which has just emerged from the greylist of the FATF, and added that each country, especially Panama, must conduct investigations and determine whether illegal or improper acts were committed.


title: Panama Papers

text: Panama's Lawyers Movement called the Panama Papers leak "cyber bullying" and in a press conference condemned it as an attack on the 'Panama' brand. Fraguela Alfonso, its president, called it a direct attack on the country's financial system.


title: Panama Papers

text: I invite all organized forces of the country to create a great crusade for the rescue of the country's image.


title: Panama Papers

text: The law firm Rubio, Álvarez, Solís & Abrego also reacted and in a press release said that "In recent decades Panama has been in the most important financial and service centers of Latin America and the entire world. As a result, all kinds of attacks on our service system have been attempted."


title: Panama Papers

text: Offshore companies are legal, said Panamanian lawyer and former controller of the republic Alvin Weeden; illegality arises when they are used for money laundering, arms smuggling, terrorism, or tax evasion.


title: Panama Papers

text: On October 19, 2016, it became known that a government executive had spent 370 million U.S. dollars in order to "clean" the country's image.


title: Panama Papers

text: On October 22, 2016, during a state visit to Germany, Varela told journalist Jenny Pérez, of Deutsche Welle that there had been "progress" in transparency and many agreements to exchange tax information, and that tax evasion was a global problem. Asked about his ties with Ramón Fonseca Mora, managing partner of the firm Mossack Fonseca, he acknowledged that he is a friend.


title: Panama Papers

text: The Procuraduría de la Nación announced that it would investigate Mossack Fonseca and the Panama papers.


title: Panama Papers

text: On April 12, the newly formed Second Specialized Prosecutor against Organized Crime raided Mossack Fonseca and searched their Bella Vista office as part of the investigation initiated by the Panama Papers. The Attorney General's office issued a press release following the raid, which lasted 27 hours, stating that the purpose was "to obtain documents relevant to the information published in news articles that establishes the possible use of the law firm in illegal activities". The search ended without measures against the law firm, confirmed prosecutor Javier Caraballo of the Second Prosecutor Against Organized Crime.


title: Panama Papers

text: The Municipality of Regulation and Supervision of Financial Subjects [not the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF)] initiated a special review of the law firm Mossack Fonseca to determine whether it had followed tax law. Carlamara Sanchez, in charge of this proceeding, said at a press conference that the quartermaster had come to verify whether the firm had complied since April 8 with due diligence, customer knowledge, the final beneficiary and reporting of suspicious transactions to Financial Analysis Unit (UAF) operations. She said that Law 23 of 2015 empowers regulation and supervision and said some firms had been monitored since late last year with special attention after the Panama Papers, and noted that the law carries fines $5,000 to $1 million or even suspension of the firm.


title: Panama Papers

text: The ICIJ investigation of Mossack Fonseca was reported to the Public Ministry. Samid Dan Sandoval, former candidate for mayor of Santiago de Veraguas (2014), filed the legal action against the journalists and all those who had participated. He said the project name damaged the integrity, dignity and sovereignty of the country and that the consortium would have to assume legal responsibility for all damage caused to the Panamanian nation.


title: Panama Papers

text: A Change.org petition requested the ICIJ stop using the name of Panama as in the Panama Papers. The request said the generally-accepted name for the investigation "damage(d) the image" of Panama.


title: Panama Papers

text: Attorney General of Panama Kenia Isolda Porcell Diaz announced on January 24, 2017 that she was suspending the investigations against Mossack Fonseca because it filed an appeal for protection of constitutional rights before the First Superior Court of Justice of Panama and requested that he deliver all the original documents to issue a judgment.


title: Panama Papers

text: In March 2018, Mossack Fonseca announced that it would cease operations at the end of March due to "irreversible damage" to their image as a direct result of the Panama Papers.


title: Panama Papers

text: Former South African president Thabo Mbeki, head of the African Union's panel on illicit financial flows, on April 9 called the leak "most welcome" and called on African nations to investigate the citizens of their nations who appear in the papers. His panel's 2015 report found that Africa loses $50 billion a year due to tax evasion and other illicit practices and its 50-year losses top a trillion dollars. Furthermore, he said, the Seychelles, an African nation, is the fourth most mentioned tax haven in the documents.


title: Panama Papers

text: On April 22, 2016, Australia said it would create a public register showing the beneficial, or actual, owners of shell companies, as part of an effort to stamp out tax avoidance by multinational corporations.


title: Panama Papers

text: The Australian Taxation Office has announced that it is investigating 800 individual Australian taxpayers on the Mossack Fonseca list of clients and that some of the cases may be referred to the country's Serious Financial Crime Task Force. Eighty names match to an organized crime intelligence database.


title: Panama Papers

text: Leaked documents examined by the ABC "pierced the veil of anonymous shell companies" and linked a Sydney businessman and a Brisbane geologist to mining deals in North Korea. "Rather than applying sanctions, the Australian Government and the ASX seem to have allowed a coach and horses to be ridden through them by the people involved in forming this relationship, corporate relationship with one of the primary arms manufacturers in North Korea," said Thomas Clark of the University of Technology Sydney.


title: Panama Papers

text: David Sutton was director of AAT Corporation and EHG Corporation when they held mineral licenses in North Korea and did business with Korean Natural Resources Development and Investment Corporation, which is under United Nations sanctions, and North Korea's "primary arms dealer and main exporter of goods and equipment related to ballistic missiles and conventional weapons, responsible for approximately half of the arms exported by North Korea." The geologist, Louis Schurmann, said British billionaire Kevin Leech was key to putting the deal together. Leaked documents also reveal the involvement of another Briton, Gibraltar-based John Lister. According to ABC, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was aware of these mining deals, which had also been brought up in the Australian Senate, but nobody ever referred the matter to the Australian Federal Police.


title: Panama Papers

text: On May 12, 2016, the names of former Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Turnbull, and former Premier of New South Wales Neville Wran, were both found in the Panama Papers, due to the pair's former directorship of the Mossack Fonseca-incorporated company "Star Technology Systems Limited". Turnbull and Wran resigned from these positions in 1995, and the Prime Minister has denied any impropriety, stating "had [Star Technology] made any profits—which it did not regrettably—it certainly would have paid tax in Australia."


title: Panama Papers

text: Media initially reported that the Panama Papers lists 500 entities created under the jurisdiction of the Cook Islands, population 10,000, almost as many as Singapore, whose population is 5.7 million. After the Winebox affair, the Cook Islands gave New Zealand jurisdiction over tax matters.


title: Panama Papers

text: New Zealand's Inland Revenue Department said that they were working to obtain details of people who have tax residence in the country who may have been involved in arrangements facilitated by Mossack Fonseca. Gerard Ryle, director of the ICIJ, told Radio New Zealand on April 8, 2016 that New Zealand is a well-known tax haven and a "nice front for criminals". New Zealand provides overseas investors with foreign trusts and look-through companies. New Zealand government policy is to not request disclosure of the identity of either the settlor or the beneficiaries of the trust, and thus the ownership remains secret, and as a consequence, thus hiding the assets from the trust-holder's home jurisdictions. These trusts are not taxed in New Zealand. These trusts can then be used to acquire and own New Zealand registered companies, which become a vehicle by which the trust owners can exercise day to day control over their assets. These New Zealand-registered companies can be designed not to make a profit using loans from tax havens and other profit shifting techniques: the result being tax free income with the general respectability that has typically been associated with companies registered in New Zealand.


title: Panama Papers

text: Prime Minister John Key responded May 7 to John Doe's remark that he had been "curiously quiet" about tax evasion in the Cook Islands by saying that the whistleblower was confused and probably European. While the Cook Islands use New Zealand currency, "I have as much responsibility for tax in the Cook Islands as I do for taxing Russia." New Zealand does represent the Cook Islands on defence and foreign policy, but not taxation, he said.


title: Panama Papers

text: In distancing New Zealand from the Cook Islands, Key ignored the close ties between the two countries and the crucial role New Zealand had in setting up the Cook Island taxation system.


title: Panama Papers

text: Mossack Fonseca approached Niue in 1996 and offered to help set up a tax haven on the tiny South Sea island. The law firm drafted the necessary legislation, permitting offshore companies to operate in total secrecy. They took care of all the paperwork, the island got a modest fee for each filing, and it seemed like quite a deal, even if they were required by law now to provide all banking paperwork in Russian and Chinese as well as English.


title: Panama Papers

text: Soon the filings almost covered the island's year budget. The US government however made official noises in 2001 about laundering criminal proceeds and Chase Bank blacklisted the island and Bank of New York followed suit. This caused inconvenience to the population so they let their contract with Mossack Fonseca expire and many of the privacy-seekers on the banking world moved on. Some did stay however, apparently; the Panama Papers database lists nearly 10,000 companies and trusts set up on Niue, population 1200.


title: Panama Papers

text: Many recently created shell companies were set up in Samoa, perhaps after Niue revised its tax laws. The Panama Papers database lists more than 13,000 companies and trusts set up there. Samoa has a population of roughly 200,000.


title: Panama Papers

text: On May 27, 2015, the US Department of Justice indicted a number of companies and individuals for conspiracy, corruption and racketeering in connection with bribes and kickbacks paid to obtain media and marketing rights for FIFA tournaments. Some immediately entered guilty pleas.


title: Panama Papers

text: Among those indicted were Jeffrey Webb and Jack Warner, the current and former presidents of CONCACAF, the continental confederation under FIFA headquartered in the United States. They were charged with racketeering and bribery offenses. Others were US and South American sports marketing executives who paid and agreed to pay well over $150 million in bribes and kickbacks.


title: Panama Papers

text: On December 12, 2014, José Hawilla, the owner and founder of the Traffic Group, the Brazilian sports marketing conglomerate, waived indictment and pleaded guilty to a four-count information charging him with racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Hawilla also agreed to forfeit over $151 million, $25 million of which was paid at the time of his plea.


title: Panama Papers

text: Torneos & Traffic (T&T) is a subsidiary of Fox International Channels since 2005 (with investments since 2002) and is the same company involved in corrupt practices in the acquisition of rights to major South American soccer tournaments.


title: Panama Papers

text: Many individuals mentioned in the Panama Papers are connected with the world governing body of association football, FIFA, including the former president of CONMEBOL Eugenio Figueredo; former President of UEFA Michel Platini; former secretary general of FIFA Jérôme Valcke; Argentine player for Barcelona Lionel Messi; and, from Italy, the head manager of Metro, Antonio Guglielmi.


title: Panama Papers

text: The leak also revealed an extensive conflict of interest between a member of the FIFA Ethics Committee and former FIFA vice president Eugenio Figueredo. Swiss police searched the offices of UEFA, European football's governing body, after the naming of former secretary-general Gianni Infantino as president of FIFA. He had signed a television deal while he was at UEFA with a company called Cross Trading, which the FBI has since accused of bribery. The contract emerged among the leaked documents. Infantino has denied wrongdoing.


title: Panama Papers

text: In April 2019, the ICIJ and European newspapers reported that the global tally of such payments exceeded one billion USD, and is now at 1.2 billion. In comparison, Great Britain recovered the largest position (253 million), followed by Denmark (237 million), Germany (183 million), Spain (164 million), France (136 million) and Australia (93 million). Colombia with 89 million recuperated the highest amount for South and Central American countries, which were heavily involved in the financial scandal. While investigations are ongoing in Austria, Canada and Switzerland, and more payments are to be expected, many countries are conducting continued inspections of companies and private individuals revealed in the report.


title: Twelve Tribes of Israel

text: The Twelve Tribes of Israel () are, according to Hebrew scriptures, the descendants of the biblical patriarch Jacob, also known as Israel, through his twelve sons through his wives, Leah and Rachel, and his concubines, Bilhah and Zilpah, who collectively form the Israelite nation. In modern scholarship, there is skepticism as to whether there ever were twelve Israelite tribes, with the use of the number 12 thought more likely to signify a symbolic tradition as part of a national founding myth.


title: Twelve Tribes of Israel

text: Jacob, later called Israel, was the second-born son of Isaac and Rebecca, the younger twin brother of Esau, and the grandson of Abraham and Sarah. According to biblical texts, he was chosen by God to be the patriarch of the Israelite nation. From what is known of Jacob, he had two wives, sisters Leah and Rachel, and two concubines, Bilhah and Zilpah, by whom he had thirteen children. The twelve sons form the basis for the twelve tribes of Israel, listed in the order from oldest to youngest: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph, and Benjamin. Jacob was known to display favoritism among his children, particularly for Joseph and Benjamin, the sons of his favorite wife, Rachel, and so the tribes themselves were not treated equally in a divine sense. Joseph, despite being the second-youngest son, received double the inheritance of his brothers, treated as if he were the firstborn son instead of Reuben, and so his tribe was later split into two tribes, named after his sons, Ephraim and Manasseh.


title: Twelve Tribes of Israel

text: The Israelites were the twelve sons of the biblical patriarch Jacob. Jacob also had one daughter, Dinah, whose descendants were not recognized as a separate tribe.


title: Twelve Tribes of Israel

text: Jacob elevated the descendants of Ephraim and Manasseh (the two sons of Joseph and his Egyptian wife Asenath) to the status of full tribes in their own right due to Joseph receiving a double portion after Reuben lost his birth right because of his transgression with Bilhah.


title: Twelve Tribes of Israel

text: In the biblical narrative the period from the conquest of Canaan under the leadership of Joshua until the formation of the United Kingdom of Israel passed with the tribes forming a loose confederation, described in the Book of Judges. Modern scholarship has called into question the beginning, middle, and end of this picture and the account of the conquest under Joshua has largely been abandoned. The Bible's depiction of the 'period of the Judges' is widely considered doubtful. The extent to which a united Kingdom of Israel ever existed is also a matter of ongoing dispute.


title: Twelve Tribes of Israel

text: Living in exile in the sixth century BCE, the prophet Ezekiel has a vision for the restoration of Israel, of a future in which the twelve tribes of Israel are living in their land again.


title: Twelve Tribes of Israel

text: According to Joshua 13–19, the Land of Israel was divided into twelve sections corresponding to the twelve tribes of Israel. However, the tribes receiving land differed from the biblical tribes. The Tribe of Levi had no land appropriation but had six Cities of Refuge under their administration as well as the Temple in Jerusalem. There was no land allotment for the Tribe of Joseph, but Joseph's two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, received their father's land portion.


title: Twelve Tribes of Israel

text: The twelve tribes of Israel are referred to in the New Testament. In the gospels of Matthew () and Luke (), Jesus anticipates that in the Kingdom of God his disciples will "sit on [twelve] thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel". The Epistle of James () addresses his audience as "the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad".


title: Twelve Tribes of Israel

text: The Book of Revelation () gives a list of the twelve tribes. However, the Tribe of Dan is omitted while Joseph is mentioned alongside Manasseh. In the vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem, the tribes' names (the names of the twelve sons of Jacob) are written on the city gates ( & ).