Uh huh. I can see where this game is going already - no matter what, you'll just respond with "nope doesn't count".
You just listed President of Ukraine, King of Saudi Arabia, PM of Jordan, Ayad Allawi the former PM of Iraq - the person the US put in charge after overthrowing Saddam ffs - those are all US / western allies. I'm not even going to look into the other ones.
So? Do you not understand how politics works?
We can both cheerypick names, but the point I am trying to make is that there are no names of important Western figures that would be anyhow directly damaged by the leaks. It appears to me that the names on that list are the people that the US want keep in check, even if only to keep the leverage in future negotiations.
You're lying here. The people you're quoting from ARE NOT ICIJ JOURNALISTS. Did you think I wasn't going to read the article, and just accept your BS? What's your motivation here for trying to attack ICIJ journalists?
I must admit I have made a mistake while writing the response and it was unintentional. The point I'm trying to make from the beginning is that the ICIJ are suspiciously selective about the leaks.
"Update: Meet the U.S. one-percenter criminals revealed in the Panama Papers"
I have seen the thread in /r/worldnews and many comments point out that all the people in the article have already been prosecuted, while the release of data covers only dozens of Americans as opposed to the thousands of Europeans.
The official message? That's just a straight up lie. That was what the editor of Süddeutsche Zeitung (a german newspaper) told a reporter at Fortune, who then tweeted it out. THAT is not an official message.
The tweet (in German) is actually from Stefan Plöchinger, who is from SZ :
Hier halb dienstlich, halb privat.
I think the SZ should be counted as one of the official voices in regards to this leak, as they were the original recipients of the 2.6 TB of data from an anonymous source.
Over a year ago, an anonymous source contacted the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and submitted encrypted internal documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that sells anonymous offshore companies around the world.
In the months that followed, the number of documents continued to grow far beyond the original leak. Ultimately, SZ acquired about 2.6 terabytes of data, making the leak the biggest that journalists had ever worked with. The source wanted neither financial compensation nor anything else in return, apart from a few security measures.