Journalist finds strength in numbers to keep truth alive

On a cold, winter day in Munich, Germany, in 2015, everything was going wrong for investigative journalist Bastian Obermayer. His parents, kids and wife were all sick. He was the only one still standing. He’d just changed his sons’ sheets when an anonymous source electronically delivered the first set of internal documents from Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider.

Obermayer eventually received a treasure trove of scandals detailing financial and attorney-client information for more than 214,488 offshore entities. The documents contained personal financial information about wealthy individuals and public officials and showed that some of the Mossack Fonseca shell corporations were being used for illegal purposes including tax fraud, tax evasion and evading international sanctions. “It went from being a bad day to a very good one,” Obermayer says during a recent interview with Fraud Magazine.

Obermayer and his source would never meet, but he or she (they introduced themselves as John Doe) had given him more than he realized on that first night. “We never spoke, not a single time. Until the end of the investigation, I didn’t hear his or her voice,” he says.