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These Are the Most Powerful Women Involved in the Panama Papers Scandal

By
Valentina Zarya
Valentina Zarya
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By
Valentina Zarya
Valentina Zarya
Down Arrow Button Icon
May 9, 2016, 5:42 PM ET
Justice Rawal Vetted for Deputy Chief Justice of Kenya
Photograph by Nation Media/Getty Images

On Monday afternoon, an enormous database of documents relating to more than 200,000 offshore accounts—also known as the Panama Papers—became available online.

The database, created by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), allows anyone interested in the scandal to search documents—most of which refer to offshore financial accounts used as tax havens for money laundering and corruption—by region and country and in five different languages. It also elegantly displays the names and titles of key people involved, which it calls the “power players.”

The vast majority of these boldface names are men, but the list does include a few prominent female politicians and public officials. Here’s a look at the women on the list:

 

Baroness Pamela Sharples
U.K. House of Lords Member

According to the ICIJ, Pamela Sharples became the sole shareholder of Nunswell Investments Limited, a company based in the Bahamas, in 1995. The database says that Sharples “used [Nunswell] to make investments.” Sharples’ law firm told ICIJ that “she became a director of Nunswell in 2000 and that the company was registered in the United Kingdom in the same year and now pays taxes to the British government.”

Ólöf Nordal
Interior minister of Iceland and member of Icelandic parliament
Nordal and her husband Tómas Már Sigurdsson, a senior executive with aluminum company (AA) Alcoa, created a company called Dooley Securities SA to hold the proceeds of Sigurdsson’s stock options, the exec told ICIJ.

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Jaynet Désirée Kabila Kyungu
Member of Parliament, Democratic Republic of the Congo
Kabila is a co-director of offshore company Keratsu Holding Limited, which has holdings in Congo’s wireless communications business. She did not respond to ICIJ’s requests for comment.

Kalpana Rawal
Deputy chief justice of the supreme court of Kenya
Rawal and her husband were directors of two companies based in the British Virgin Islands that have been used to buy and sell London real estate. Rawal told the ICIJ that she has not been involved with the family real estate business.

The database also implicates the wives of country leaders and politicians, including Mehriban Aliyeva, wife of Azerbaijan’s prime minister; Micaela Domecq Solís-Beaumont, wife of Spain’s agriculture minister; and Mamadie Touré, widow of the former dictator and president of Guinea.

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By Valentina Zarya
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