How much good can journalistic investigations do for the public interest? Is it primarily the malfunctions and injustices they reveal? The regulatory loopholes they expose? It's also, in the case of major cases of tax fraud and evasion, the millions that can be repatriated to state coffers for public spending.
In this respect, the Panama Papers are well on the way to breaking all records. Upon its publication, in April 2016, this then-unprecedented worldwide investigation, carried out by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and its 109 partner media outlets at the time, including Le Monde, shook the planet. It revealed the secret assets of heads of state, billionaires and criminals hidden in tax havens, behind the cover of shell companies.
Seven years and hundreds of audits later, France has already recovered €195.5 million in tax revenue for the state budget, according to a new count obtained by Le Monde from the Directorate General of Public Finances (DGFiP). Rendered invisible in offshore arrangements, this money corresponds to 219 taxpayer files, both individuals and companies, caught in the net of the Panama Papers. It's the sum of all financial audits completed by December 31, 2022, as well as regularizations made.
The milestone of €200 million repatriated should be reached this year. That's €70 million more than the last count, back in 2019, which was published in a parliamentary report. It is also – to give an example – the equivalent of the government budget asked for by the food charity Restos du Cœur, which would enable all of France's food aid NGOs cope with the increase in poverty.
These reassessments place France in the club of five countries to have recovered more than €100 million in taxes and penalties thanks to the Panama Papers, along with the UK, Germany, Spain and Australia.
To identify suspect taxpayers, the Finance Ministry's services relied not only on articles in Le Monde and partners, but also on data put online by the ICIJ in its Offshore Leaks Database, listing basic information on shell companies (shareholders, managers, intermediaries) that were not made public in tax havens. Thanks to this first stage of work, the DGFiP was able to identify potential tax evaders, before carrying out further verifications.
In France, for the time being, the Panama Papers's financial impact, with their myriad shell companies registered in Panama, the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda or the Cayman Islands in the 1990s and 2000s, ranks right at the top of the list of major collaborative investigations into hidden offshore money.
In terms of results, the "leak" is right up there with investigations into the Swiss bank HSBC, which was involved in a vast scandal of undeclared bank accounts in the early 2000s. A first salvo of confidential data was sent to the French tax authorities by the group's former computer scientist Hervé Falciani in 2008, followed by a second salvo, revealed by the 2015 "SwissLeaks" investigation, also steered by ICIJ with the help of a dataset obtained by Le Monde. The DGFiP decided to aggregate the two files, between them eventually enabling the Finance Ministry to recover €243 million in combined taxes and penalties.
What will be the eventual total of hidden offshore "loot" recovered by France thanks to the leaks discovered by ICIJ and its media partners? All told, from the Offshore Leaks (2013) to the Pandora Papers (2021), the sum recovered today stands at over €450 million. However, this figure will remain incomplete until all checks have been completed.
Now, as well as the Panama Papers, the meter is running for the Paradise Papers investigation, published in November 2017. This revealed the tax optimization practices of political leaders, large fortunes and multinationals, all of which went through the Bermuda-based Appleby firm. To date, operations carried out by the DGFiP have allowed recovery of €15.3 million euros for 44 files, out of a total of 240 taxpayers audited.
Ultimately, the outcome of the Pandora Papers is not yet known. The DGFiP states that it is "currently examining the files of just over 150 taxpayers," but that it does not yet have sufficient perspective on the whole operation to be able to quantify the procedures that have been launched on the basis of these revelations.
Generally speaking, the investigations carried out by the ICIJ and its partners have made it possible to identify numbers, names and precise patterns on offshore finance and tax evasion and avoidance practices that are now totally globalized, but which remain complicated to grasp without a global view. Shell companies registered in several offshore jurisdictions are often stacked up like Russian dolls, in order to prevent the money trail and origin of the funds in their bank accounts from being traced. As a result, there is now stronger international cooperation between countries when exchanging information on their respective taxpayers.
"These investigations are of real interest to the DGFiP," said the Finance Ministry. They may encourage certain taxpayers, concerned about their reputation, to regularize their tax affairs, as was the case with the Panama Papers. Many cases are being referred to the courts, even when the information is incomplete, but suggests a "presumption of tax fraud."
These long-term investigations also provide the French government with information on the nature of the routes and tools used to evade tax, and also, to a certain extent, the scale of offshore tax evasion. This is invaluable information for France – one of the countries that has not yet carried out a quantified assessment of sums escaping taxation. The Cour des Comptes (Court of Auditors) has just asked France to carry out this assessment without delay.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.