Date of publication
3 April 2026
Reading Time
4 minutes 30 seconds
If you received this text message from an unknown number, what would you do?
“Hello. This is John Doe. Interested in data?”
You’d probably ignore it. Another scam. But a second message arrives:
“There are a couple of conditions. My life is in danger, we will only chat over encrypted files. No meeting ever.”
Most people wouldn’t respond. However, Bastian Obermayer, a journalist at Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, did the opposite. He kept talking. What followed was the Panama Papers - 11.5 million leaked documents naming hundreds of world leaders, business executives, and celebrities, revealing over 200,000 secret offshore companies. Financial networks stretching into 200 countries were found moving billions of dollars worth of suspect funds through the global economy.
That was ten years ago this week. Citizens poured into the streets. In Iceland, protesters threw bananas and yoghurt at their parliament. In Pakistan, they threw rocks. The world got a glimpse of how the rich and powerful can use the financial system to hide stolen wealth.
A decade on, we know that illicit finance is not an abstract problem of offshore bank accounts and financial networks. It props up rogue regimes, fuels global conflicts, and increases instability. If The Panama Papers exposed the extent of the problem, recent years have exposed the real-world impact.
As images of Russian troops attacking Ukrainian villages flashed across the world, the UK was confronted with its own complicit role. Using the same UK tax havens and secrecy loopholes uncovered in The Panama Papers, Putin’s oligarchs had hidden their money right under the UK’s nose. In 2022, Transparency International found that £1.5 billion had been invested into UK property by Russians accused of financial crime or with links to the Kremlin. Some properties were a stone’s throw from Parliament. More recently, we found £11 billion of suspicious funds in the UK property market associated with other locations.
Entangled with Russian money, the UK took action. It gave law enforcement new powers to pursue financial criminals, made it harder to create anonymous shell companies, and required foreign entities owning UK property to disclose their true owners. Just last year, it began a multi-year reform to regulate lawyers and accountants that make this activity possible.
But elsewhere, progress stalled. The British Virgin Islands - by far the most popular destination to hide secrets in the Panama Papers, home to 52% of all the entities exposed - continues to resist pressure from the UK Government to clean up its act.
Meanwhile, new threats have emerged. Crypto-assets are increasingly exploited for large-scale money laundering and sanctions evasion. Illicit gold trading - where London holds the biggest market - is worth tens of billions, fuels corruption, environmental destruction, and human rights abuses. And property remains, as ever, the safest bet for anyone looking for a stable return on a criminal investment.
As part of its wider efforts to tackle corruption and money laundering, the UK is hosting an international summit to tackle abuse in these three areas: crypto, gold, and property. In June, countries from all over the world are being invited to London. Financial crime is a global problem, requiring global solutions. After all, the Panama Papers involved almost every country in the world, the stolen money in London’s property market is usually taken from the budgets of other nations, and banks are processing 60 million cross-border transactions every single day. No country can solve this alone.
To succeed amid global crises, this Summit cannot simply be a talking shop - it must lead to concrete initiatives. The UK must propose multi-year programmes that countries can sign up to - focusing on collective action, not just sharing best practices.
It must also have true representation at the table. Financial crime has victims beyond the conflicts it fuels - stolen money often comes from developing countries, leaving less money to spend on health and education. The Summit will be less effective as a private party among large economies.
And true representation must extend beyond governments. The role and the knowledge of the private sector - especially as the first line of defence against economic crime - cannot be overlooked. The impact of civil society and investigative journalists are vital to revealing financial networks. My counterparts in Russia and Venezuela, operating in exile, continue to uncover corruption in the most difficult of circumstances.
To encourage other governments, it must design an action-orientated summit and continue to clean up its own act. The British Virgin Islands, home to more than half the secret entities exposed in the Panama Papers, remain as opaque as ever. Despite years of pressure from Westminster, the territory has failed to introduce a fully public register of company owners. The UK has the constitutional authority to compel action but has so far chosen not to use it. If the Summit is to have credibility, the UK cannot ask other countries to raise their standards while tolerating secrecy in its own backyard.
Ten years ago, it was an anonymous source that spoke to a journalist, risking everything to show the world how the system really works. In a challenging geopolitical environment marred by conflict and self-interest, it is the UK that is sticking its head above the parapet to find solutions. For this, it deserves credit.