DARK HAVENS: Confronting Hidden Money & Power

About

The first event of The Art of Exposing Injustice series focuses on the issues of financial corruption and tax havens and the informational, political, technological and artistic response to such topics. Following the cases of the Panama Papers, the Bahamas Leaks and the Paradise Papers, this event aims to discuss the inner mechanisms of the financial system, and the crime, corruption and wrongdoing hidden by secretive offshore companies. We will analyse the development and current results of these giant leaks of financial and legal records, by also interconnecting financial matters with related act of whistleblowing and truth-telling to denounce financial corruption.

The Panama Paper refers to the 2016 leak of 11.5 million financial and legal records from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. The documents were leaked by an anonymous whistleblower, under the fake name of “John Doe”, to Bastian Obermayer, investigative journalist of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Due the giant amount of data, the Süddeutsche Zeitung journalists Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier (our Keynote on April 6) shared the information with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), and other media organisations, publishing the case on April 2016.

Connecting people, roles, monetary flow, and structure legality, these cases generate questions about identity information, financial transactions, as well as the economy of tax havens, posing to journalists and the larger civic society issues of security and openness related to strategies of documents’ indexing, and contributing in revealing misconducts and wrongdoing of the powerful.

Curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli. In cooperation with Transparency International.