10 Years On: How Panama Papers rewrote Nigeria’s transparency law, sparked regulatory policies

Ten years ago, on 3 April 2016, the world’s largest network of journalists began running a series of reports across various media platforms, exposing the assets of powerful and influential people deliberately designed to stay hidden. What they uncovered became the Panama Papers.

The Panama Papers series was a sweeping, landmark investigation that exposed the secretive world of finance and exposed how the rich and powerful use offshore structures to shield wealth and evade scrutiny.

The global fallout was immediate and consequential. The investigation triggered tax reforms across multiple jurisdictions, enabled the recovery of more than $1.36 billion in tax revenue worldwide, and led to a sharp decline in corporate registrations in Panama.

Political leaders in Iceland and Pakistan fell from power. Arrests were made. New laws were enacted. Government probes were launched in dozens of countries.

PREMIUM TIMES was part of the investigations that saw the ICIJ publish a searchable database that strips away the secrecy of nearly 214,000 offshore entities in 21 jurisdictions.

As the only Nigerian news organisation granted direct access to the leaked files, PREMIUM TIMES published more than 30 stories drawn from the internal records of Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm at the heart of the scandal.

The reports named more than 140 Nigerian individuals and companies as operators of offshore shell companies in tax havens and, in doing so, permanently altered public discourse on financial accountability in Nigeria.

The newspaper’s explosive investigations revealed the secret offshore assets of former Senate President Bukola Saraki and his wife Toyin, as well as those of Mr Saraki’s predecessor, David Mark.

It also revealed how the late governor of Bayelsa State, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, began looting his state and hiding the funds in offshore structures, and how a former governor of Delta State, James Ibori, once convicted in the United Kingdom for corruption, organised the theft of the oil-rich state’s funds via offshore companies.

The investigations also revealed a network of shell companies in offshore tax havens linked to Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, and his brother, Sayyu Dantata, as well as the offshore companies of Wale Tinubu, the chief executive of Nigeria’s biggest indigenous oil company, Oando Plc, among others.

Similarly, the reports also exposed the secret offshore company of one of Africa’s most influential televangelists, the late Temitope Joshua, popularly called T.B. Joshua.

Other prominent Nigerians named in the investigation are former Minister of Defence and billionaire businessperson, Theophilus Danjuma; Etisalat boss, Hakeem Bello Osaigie; Globacom CEO, Mike Adenuga; former governor Abubakar Bello of Niger State; the late Ooni of Ife, Okunade Sijuwade; Arik Chairperson, Joseph Arumemi-Johnson and his wife, Mary, as well as two other serving senators – Andy Uba (Anambra) and Ibrahim Gobir (Sokoto).

Top-tier politicians, businesspeople, and members of their families were found across the database, including individuals who continued to hold public office at the time of publication.

It is important to note that the use of shell companies is not inherently illegal.

Many individuals and firms incorporate them for entirely legitimate purposes. However, some of the Nigerian public officeholders identified in the investigation had failed to declare their offshore assets to the Code of Conduct Bureau, placing them in potential violation of Nigerian law.

Ten years after: What changed

Ten years on, this newspaper examines how that investigation has shaped the country’s legal and regulatory landscape.

Although no Nigerian named in the Panama Papers was prosecuted or jailed as a direct result of the revelations, the investigations generated significant institutional momentum. Anti-corruption agencies expressed an intention to investigate public officers named, including those who had left office, but the vows were not known to have been carried out.

However, law enforcement agencies and regulatory bodies moved to close loopholes that had long allowed financial secrecy to thrive.

Beneficial Ownership: A register long overdue

Among the most consequential outcomes was Nigeria’s push to establish a Beneficial Ownership Register — a centralised database designed to identify the natural persons who ultimately own, control, or benefit from corporate entities.

Former President Muhammadu Buhari first committed to creating such a register in direct response to PREMIUM TIMES’ Panama Papers exposés.

The Companies and Allied Matters Act (CAMA) was subsequently re-enacted in 2020. The updated legislation now mandates the mandatory disclosure of “persons of significant control”, effectively codifying beneficial ownership requirements into Nigerian corporate law. The Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) mandated that companies disclose their beneficial owners at the time of registration.

NEITI and the Extractive Industries

In the wake of the Panama Papers investigation, the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), which promotes transparency, accountability, and good governance in Nigeria’s oil, gas, and solid mineral sectors through independent audits, published a roadmap for beneficial ownership disclosure in December 2016.

NEITI subsequently collaborated with the Nigerian upstream Regulatory Petroleum Commission (NURPC) to produce a register of beneficial owners of oil and gas companies operating in Nigeria, completed in 2020.

It defines a beneficial owner as a natural person who directly or indirectly benefits from, owns, or controls a corporate entity. Its standard required member countries to disclose their beneficial owners by January 2020 and strongly recommended establishing national beneficial ownership registers.

VAIDS: A taxman’s olive branch

Also introduced in the aftermath of the Panama Papers was the Voluntary Assets and Income Declaration Scheme (VAIDS). This time-limited initiative allowed taxpayers to regularise their tax status by making full, honest, and verifiable declarations of previously undisclosed assets and income.

The scheme covered outstanding tax liabilities from prior periods during which taxpayers had been in default, and was designed to encourage voluntary compliance rather than punitive enforcement.

The Panama Papers remain the most significant data-driven investigation in the history of journalism. The ICIJ, in publishing the searchable database, declared it was acting squarely in the public interest, and the breadth of the response, from legislative chambers to courtrooms across the world, bore that out.

READ ALSO: PANAMA PAPERS @10: How Premium Times exposed top Nigerian officials’ assets in tax havens

For Nigeria, the legacy of that investigation remains complicated. The individuals named were not held criminally accountable. But the country’s regulatory framework is, on paper at least, far more transparent than it was a decade ago.

The CAC now demands to know who is really behind a company, just as the extractive sector has a register.

Scope of leaks

The Panama Papers were built on a foundation of data unprecedented in the history of investigative journalism. More than 11.5 million financial and legal records — totalling 2.6 terabytes of information were leaked from Mossack Fonseca. This firm had spent decades specialising in the creation of offshore companies, some of which were used by fraudsters to conceal Ponzi schemes, predatory lending operations, and other financial crimes from both their victims and the authorities.

The leaked data spanned nearly four decades, from 1977 through the end of 2015. It offered, for the first time, a day-by-day, decade-by-decade window into how dark money flows through the global financial system — breeding crime and systematically stripping national treasuries of tax revenue.

More than 370 reporters across nearly 80 countries participated in the investigation, coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). Their collective work uncovered the secret offshore holdings of 12 sitting world leaders, more than 128 politicians, and scores of fraudsters, drug traffickers, and other criminals whose companies had already been blacklisted in the United States and elsewhere.