As a former Mossack Fonseca executive stands trial in Germany and governments worldwide recoup billions in lost taxes, Nigeria’s offshore accountability gap endures. KEHINDE ADEGOKE writes.
While a former executive of the world’s most infamous offshore law firm sat in a Cologne courtroom this March accepting “the consequences” of his role in one of history’s biggest financial scandals, Nigeria — a country whose elite featured prominently in the leaked files that triggered that scandal — has yet to prosecute a single person in connection with the Panama Papers.
Ten years after the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published more than 11.5 million confidential documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, exposing a vast global network of offshore shell companies used by politicians, business executives and heads of state to hide wealth and evade taxes, the world has moved. Nigeria, largely, has not.
The Trial That Rewound a Decade
Christoph Zollinger, a dual Swiss-Panamanian citizen and former partner at Mossack Fonseca, is currently standing trial in Cologne on charges of facilitating tax evasion. German investigators issued an international arrest warrant for him in 2020. He came forward to face trial in 2024. Prosecutors have linked him to a tax loss of approximately 13 million euros tied to 50 offshore companies. If convicted, he faces up to seven and a half years in prison.
In a statement read to the court by his lawyers at the March hearing, Zollinger denied founding a criminal organisation but admitted to aiding and abetting tax evasion.
“If you are working for another law firm, doing something similar, you should be well aware that this could be your destiny in the future,” Frederik Obermaier, one of the two journalists who received the original Panama Papers leak, told ICIJ after attending the first day of the trial. “Sitting in front of a court, and having to explain what you have done.”
It is a warning that has gone largely unheeded in Nigeria.
What a Serious Response Looks Like
The contrast with India is the most instructive available. When The Indian Express recently obtained government data through a public information request, the figures were striking enough to lead the newspaper’s front page: Indian tax authorities had brought approximately $1.4 billion in undisclosed offshore investments linked to the Panama Papers to tax. Forty-six criminal prosecution complaints had been filed. Searches, seizures and surveys had been conducted across 84 Panama Papers-related cases.
“Investigations take a long time,” Ritu Sarin, executive editor of investigations at The Indian Express, told ICIJ. “But things are moving.”
Nigeria has published no comparable figures. The Federal Inland Revenue Service has never disclosed how many Nigerian names appeared in the Panama Papers files, how many have been investigated, or how much has been recovered. No senior Nigerian official linked to the Panama Papers has faced prosecution. No parliamentary inquiry has been publicly concluded.
The Reforms Nigeria Never Made
The Panama Papers did not just trigger prosecutions. They triggered legislation. Country after country closed the loopholes the documents exposed.
The British Virgin Islands — home to the largest number of offshore companies named in the papers — passed a law requiring offshore service providers to report the real owners of companies to local authorities. New Zealand tightened its trust laws so thoroughly that the number of foreign trusts registered there fell by 75 per cent. The United Kingdom created a criminal offence for lawyers who fail to report clients’ tax evasion to authorities. Panama itself made it mandatory for law firms to identify and verify the ultimate beneficial owners they work with.
In the United States, the Corporate Transparency Act of 2021 required company owners to disclose their identities to the Treasury Department — described as the biggest revision of American anti-money laundering controls in a generation.
Nigeria enacted no equivalent legislation in the decade since publication. The country’s anti-money laundering framework has been repeatedly revised under pressure from the Financial Action Task Force, but beneficial ownership transparency — the specific reform the Panama Papers made urgent — has not been implemented at the standard that peer jurisdictions have reached.
The Wealth That Keeps Disappearing
The stakes of that inaction are not theoretical. A 2026 Oxfam analysis found that the amount of untaxed wealth hidden offshore by the richest 0.1 per cent of the global population exceeds the entire wealth of the poorest half of humanity. That same 0.1 per cent holds approximately 80 per cent of all untaxed offshore wealth.
For Nigeria, where the federal government is currently negotiating a ₦3.3 trillion settlement of power sector debts it cannot fully fund, where local government chairmen report receiving monthly allocations of less than ₦1,000, and where public infrastructure remains chronically starved of investment, the connection between offshore secrecy and domestic poverty is direct.
Every naira parked in an undisclosed shell company in Panama, the British Virgin Islands or any other secrecy jurisdiction is a naira that never reached a classroom, a hospital or a power grid.
“There is no lack of money in the world,” tax policy analyst Tove Maria Ryding told ICIJ. “It’s just that when it comes to funding public budgets, some people pay their taxes and some people don’t.”
A Reckoning That Keeps Finding People
What the Cologne trial demonstrates most powerfully is that the Panama Papers did not expire. They are a living investigative record that law enforcement agencies across the world continue to mine, a decade on. Iceland’s prime minister fell within days of publication. Pakistan’s longest-serving prime minister was removed from office by his country’s Supreme Court and later sentenced to 10 years in prison. Politicians in Mongolia and Spain lost office. Mossack Fonseca itself shuttered within months of the exposé.
Globally, ICIJ estimates at least $1.3 billion has been directly recovered by authorities as a result of the investigation — a figure its analysts describe as likely an undercount, since many countries do not publicly report what they collect.
The investigation also permanently reshaped public consciousness. It inspired the 2019 film The Laundromat, a Netflix thriller subplot, at least 38 songs, and spontaneous dinner table conversations across 190 countries.
More consequentially, it proved that large-scale cross-border journalism could be done safely, that sources could be protected, and that powerful people in powerful places could be held to account. It seeded every major collaborative investigation that followed — the Paradise Papers, the Pandora Papers, the FinCEN Files.
“Even though we actually knew about the problem,” Ryding told ICIJ, “the power of the Panama Papers meant that suddenly some things became politically realistic. Things that were impossible before suddenly became politically possible.”
In Nigeria, that political possibility has yet to be tested.
