BREAKING ACROSS EUROPE/MALTA FILES: the tidal wave has hit the “Panama of Europe”

The tidal wave has broken over Malta’s financial services industry: 150,000 documents from a financial services provider in Malta – emails, contracts, documents, invoices – were leaked some months ago to the German magazine Der Spiegel. Together with an Excel file listing 53,247 Malta companies and their shareholders, leaked to the news magazine portal The Black Sea last September, they have become The Malta Files.

Forty-nine journalists from 13 European media houses have been working – under the collective name European Investigative Collaborations or ECI Network – on the documents for the last four months. The first tranche of stories broke some hours ago across Europe.

This piece gives you some background.