How’s your life this Christmas? Can you barely afford to fill up your tank with petrol, and pay the skyrocketing cost of meat and bread caused by the exorbitant fuel prices which farmers and distributors now have to pay to bring their products to market?

I know these past six months have been especially brutal for me. I often have gone without my car for weeks at a time as I couldn’t afford the cost of fuel, opted not to put on winter tires as I couldn’t afford them and therefore had to sit home when we had less than one cm [= 2/5ths of an inch] of snow that blew in from the Pyrenees. I couldn’t afford to repair my car while I saved more money.

Do you think it is easy for me to spend the tens of millions of your money given to my husband

Meanwhile, in Ukraine – a popular meme these days- the corrupt president and his wife have been living it up. I first discovered how rich they were after sifting through the Pandora Papers last year. If you haven’t gone down that rabbit hole yet, I highly advise a good Google search to see who has much of your money.

The Pandora Papers are 11.9 million leaked documents with 2.9 terabytes of data that the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published beginning on 3 October 2021.

The leak exposed the secret offshore accounts of 35 world leaders, including current and former presidents, prime ministers, and heads of state as well as more than 100 billionaires, celebrities, and business leaders.

The news organizations of the ICIJ described the document leak as their most expansive exposé of financial secrecy yet, containing documents, images, emails and spreadsheets from 14 financial service companies, in nations including Panama, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates, surpassing their previous release of the Panama Papers in 2016, which had 11.5 million confidential documents (2.6 terabytes). 

At the time of the release of the papers, the ICIJ said it is not identifying its source for the documents.

Estimates by the ICIJ of money held offshore (outside the country where the money was made) range from US$5.6 trillion to US$32 trillion. If you care you should share this story on social media:

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