In other words, he assisted in creating the laws and regulatory framework necessary for the country's industry of offshore banks and trust companies. In another, Asiaciti bragged that Briggs was responsible for the “setting up of the structure and legislation of the Samoa offshore finance centre”.

In one email obtained in the leak, a Samoan regulator described Briggs as the 'grandfather' of the offshore industry.

To his clients, Briggs promoted one island nation that others had overlooked: Samoa. In the middle of the Pacific, a new tax haven was emerging, and he was helping it grow. If the documents were printed out and stacked up they would be four times taller than Sydney's Centrepoint Tower. Since 2019, 11.9 million documents from 14 offshore providers have been leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the collective behind the landmark Panama Papers exposé.Įven by the ICIJ's standards, this is big. A massive leakĭetails of the Moscow meeting between Graeme Briggs, a little-known Australian accountant, and a member of Russia's business elite are contained in the 'Pandora Papers', one of the largest leaks of financial documents in history. After a series of suspicious multi-million dollar transactions, those secrets would start spilling out. But the decision to play Russian roulette would backfire.

Briggs has always managed to stay on the right side of the law. A gifted accountant, Briggs and his company Asiaciti had made a fortune crafting trusts and financial structures to protect not only their clients' money, but also their secrets. While Gref hadn't been personally sanctioned, it still made him a high-risk client, the kind that would scare off most accountancy firms. Gref's bank had recently been slapped with international sanctions after Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down by Russian-backed separatists. ( Reuters: Shamil Zhumatov and Sergei Karpukhin/La Maree/Sputnik) Herman Gref (right) worked in Vladimir Putin's government.

Dual family secrets