Paradise Papers Shine Light on Where the Elite Hide Their Money

The Times’s Coverage So Far

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Behind one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent investors, Yuri Milner, was hundreds of millions of dollars in Kremlin funding. The documents show that Mr. Milner’s investment in Twitter relied on money from VTB, bank controlled by the Russian state. One of his most significant investors in Facebook relied on funding from Gazprom Investholding, another government-controlled institution. Mr. Milner is also an investor in Cadre, a New York-based real estate technology company founded by Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser.

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Apple has come under scrutiny by Congress for shifting much of its earnings to Irish subsidiaries, avoiding income taxes. Documents from the leak show that after its chief executive, Tim Cook, said that the company didn’t just “stash money on a Caribbean island,” it found a new tax haven — an island in the English Channel. The use of complex offshore structures have helped keep much of Apple’s more than $128 billion in profit abroad free from taxation. The technique isn’t unique to Apple. “U.S. multinational firms are the global grandmasters of tax avoidance schemes,” said Edward Kleinbard, a former corporate tax adviser to such companies.

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Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, invested in a shipping company whose top clients include a Russian firm controlled by an oligarch facing sanctions and President Vladimir V. Putin’s son-in-law. The ethics agreement Mr. Ross filed when taking office said he intended to retain several investment partnerships, but did not specify that they were used to hold his stake in the shipper, Navigator Holdings. The revelations of Mr. Ross’s continued investment led Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, to call for an investigation. Mr. Ross said he had done nothing wrong, but would “probably” sell his Navigator shares.

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A bank in Utah is in the business of helping wealthy foreigners register private planes in the United States, which requires American citizenship or residency. The offshore files shed light on how a small financial institution, the Bank of Utah, served as a stand-in for citizenship purposes to allow Russia’s richest man, Leonid Mikhelson, whose energy company is subject to sanctions, register a $65 million Gulfstream jet.

Who Are Appleby’s Clients?

The predominantly elite clients of Appleby contrast with those of Mossack Fonseca — the company whose leaked records became the Panama Papers — which appeared to be less discriminating in the business it took on. The records date back to 1950 and up to 2016.

Appleby has offices in tax havens around the world. In addition to its Bermudan headquarters, it works out of places like the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean; the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey off Britain; Mauritius and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean; and Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Americans — companies and people — dominate the list of clients. Past disclosures, such as the 2013 “Offshore Leaks” from two offshore incorporators in Singapore and the British Virgin Islands, the 2015 “Swiss Leaks” from a private Swiss bank owned by the British bank HSBC and another leak in 2016 from the Bahamas were dominated by clients not from the United States.

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The documents come not only from Appleby, but also from the Singaporean company Asiaciti Trust and official business registries in places such as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Lebanon and Malta.

Setting up companies offshore is generally legal, and corporations routinely do so to facilitate cross-border transactions such as mergers and acquisitions. Appleby, in a public statement on Oct. 24, after inquiries from I.C.I.J., said that it was “subject to frequent regulatory checks” in “highly regulated jurisdictions.”

“Appleby has thoroughly and vigorously investigated the allegations and we are satisfied that there is no evidence of any wrongdoing, either on the part of ourselves or our clients,” the company said.

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Cyclist Lost Her Job After Raising Middle Finger at Trump’s Motorcade

She kept her arm up until the rest of the fleet passed and then repeated the gesture a second time when the cars came to a stop and she caught up. She said she locked eyes with a man inside who she thought was a Secret Service agent, and then held the gaze of another man, but then the cars moved past her and drove away.

“I did not see him, but he was the target,” she said of Mr. Trump.

The moment might have faded into obscurity. But riding along with the president’s motorcade was a gaggle of journalists and photographers who captured the gesture in images that were distributed far and wide, spreading online.

Steve Herman, the White House bureau chief for Voice of America, posted an image captured by an Agence France-Presse photographer on his Twitter timeline.

Lone cyclist responds to @POTUS motorcade shortly after departing Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va. (Photo: @b_smialowski/@AFP) pic.twitter.com/MKM1kVIyTY

—
Steve Herman (@W7VOA)
Oct. 29, 2017

It was soon embraced by Trump critics. Ms. Briskman said she became aware of the photograph the next day, when Indivisible Loudoun ACTION, an anti-Trump Facebook group, posted Mr. Herman’s tweet and asked, “Who is this?” Ms. Briskman replied in the comments section that she was the cyclist.

“Then the ball started rolling,” she said. “And it started getting a lot of traction.” She said she kept track of the tens of thousands of times that the photograph was shared from Mr. Herman’s timeline. Jimmy Fallon featured a segment showing the image, she said. And Ms. Briskman was referred to online as a “She-ro.”

By Monday morning, Oct. 30, Ms. Briskman had affixed the image on her Facebook and Twitter accounts. Neither account identified her as an employee of Akima L.L.C., which oversees government contractors and where she had been employed as a marketing analyst for a little more than six months. But she decided it would be a good idea to mention it to a human resources official at her employer.

“I went in and I said: ‘Have you heard about the bike woman?’” Ms. Briskman said. The human resources official said no. “You’re going to have to look that up,” Ms. Briskman told her. “It’s me.”

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On Oct. 31, she was called into a meeting with the official and two other company executives.

“We have chosen to separate from you,” she quoted one of them as saying to her, citing the company’s social media policy ban on “obscene content.”

She said she was told that she was not meeting the company’s code of conduct and that the officials feared “it could hurt business” because of their work related to government contracts.

A company representative from Akima, in Herndon, Va., did not return multiple telephone calls seeking comment on Monday. The company says on its website that Akima conducts business in accordance with “the highest ethical standards.” According to that statement:

Akima expects that a high level of ethical standards and personal integrity will be reflected in all of its business dealings.

Similarly, Akima expects its employees, officers and directors to exercise good judgment and maintain high ethical standards in all activities which affect Akima. Every Akima employee is held to these standards.

Ms. Briskman said she was later encouraged by the human resources official to submit a resignation because it would be easier to get future work. She did, calling it a “forced resignation.” She was escorted from the building.

“I was surprised,” she said. “Because I don’t view that as obscene as other content that you see out there.”

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