How a German Newspaper Became the Go-To Place for Leaks Like the Paradise Papers
Journalists working on the Paradise Papers had used iHub, for example, to coördinate research into Nike’s byzantine international registration arrangements. “Everybody went shopping,” Obermayer’s colleague Elisabeth Gamperl told me. Reporters in more than half a dozen European countries went out and bought Nike shoes. Using the tax identification numbers on the different receipts, and the information gleaned from the leaked documents, they were able to determine that sales revenues were not staying in the country where the shoes were purchased but, rather, being funneled to the Netherlands, which has become one of Europe’s tax havens.
.. Obermayer told me that his source for the Panama Papers, whom he refers to as John Doe, had tried to get the attention of several large international outlets, including a U.S. paper, before he got in touch with him.
.. Süddeutsche Zeitung has, in recent years, pulled even with, or perhaps surpassed, the Frankfurter Allegemeine as the daily newspaper of record in Germany.
.. The only strategy to survive in the long run in this very complicated and economically difficult environment is that we have to differentiate ourselves from others, so that people can find in our newspaper something they cannot find anywhere else,
.. Obermayer spoke about some of the criticism levelled against the Panama Papers—including the arguments that, because the first leak hadn’t contained revelations about major American figures, the documents must have been fake, or some kind of conspiracy.
.. U.S. intelligence agencies issued a report stating that Vladimir Putin believed the Panama Papers were an attack against Russia—and suggesting that Russia’s meddling in last year’s U.S. Presidential election may have been a form of retaliation.