ICIJ unmasked shell-company owners through the paperwork formation agents must file

For investigative journalists, the person behind a shell company can seem as untraceable as a UFO sighting. Secrecy jurisdictions from the British Virgin Islands to Panama, Cyprus and the Cayman Islands obscure who owns what, and the visible signatories are often straw men — one person can be listed as director of a hundred companies while earning pocket money as a taxi driver in Azerbaijan. Searching by the name everyone knows leads nowhere, because the name everyone knows is not on the documents.

The breakthrough insight is that shells still need paperwork. Incorporation requires an official business address, real names for at least some directors, and documents about the nature of the business, and the formation agents who supply shells, straw men and secretarial services for fees as low as US$14 cannot avoid filing those basics. The same agents collect passports and utility bills from their real clients — and leaks capture that trust, which is why home addresses surface in the files.

ICIJ's data and research team, in a method deputy head Karrie Kehoe shared at the 2024 NICAR summit, turns that paper trail into searchable practice. OpenCorporates aggregates records from more than 140 government registries; the free Offshore Leaks database holds vetted data on 810,000 offshore companies, foundations and trusts across 200 countries; and OCCRP's Aleph adds gazettes and court records. Reporters vary spellings, verify addresses against maps, predict the yachts, art and luxury property that billionaires buy, and follow family links to assets in relatives' names.

The payoff is concrete: searching for the foreign assets of a Middle East king in 2021, Kehoe and colleagues found fourteen luxury homes in the UK and US bought through tax-haven front companies — with dramatic confirmation when formation agents listed the client's home address on registration documents as the kingdom's 'royal palace'. The GIJN write-up of the method drew 1,068 points and 496 comments on Hacker News, and the Offshore Leaks database remains free precisely so reporters anywhere can keep finding new stories in it.

Chase the paperwork, not the person: formation agents must file real addresses and names, and their client documents are the trail that leaks expose

Secrecy regimes hide owners but not the filings: incorporation still demands an address, some real director names and business documents.

Formation agents sell straw men yet collect passports and utility bills from real clients, so the service that conceals also preserves the trail.

Vetted leak databases (810,000 offshore entities across 200 countries) make the paper trail searchable by any reporter for free, filterable by leak and region.

Spelling variants and predictable asset classes give a needle-in-a-haystack search concrete anchors instead of blind queries.

When someone hides behind a legal fiction, find the unavoidable artifact of the act — mandatory filings, agents' records, registered addresses — and build the search around that artifact.

Kehoe's team proved the method in the 2021 search that tied a Middle East king's tax-haven front companies to fourteen luxury homes in the UK and US; the decisive breadcrumb was formation agents listing the client's home address as the kingdom's royal palace. In April 2024 the NICAR24 talk and GIJN write-up turned the approach into a checklist any reporter can run, and the Hacker News thread (1,068 points, 496 comments) showed strong public appetite for unmasking hidden ownership. ICIJ keeps the Offshore Leaks database free because more stories remain in the data.