The Council of the European Union has formally requested the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to release to each EU member state any information from its leaked cache of offshore financial data that may involve citizens of those countries. 

In a letter addressed to ICIJ director Gerard Ryle, the chairman of the European Council High Level Working Party (Taxation), Niall Cody, said the work of ICIJ in highlighting the role of offshore financial centers is a “significant development in the ongoing fight against tax evasion” and that the release of “entity ownership data to EU tax authorities would lead to unpaid taxes being recovered, with sanctions applied, in cases of tax evasion.” 

The EU Council is not the first government agency interested in getting access to the massive leak of financial information that ICIJ has analyzed and reported on for more than 15 months with leading media outlets around the world. Earlier requests came from the United States, Germany, Greece, South Korea and Canada. 

ICIJ’s position has not changed: the consortium and its media partners will not release the offshore data to government agencies. 

ICIJ is not an arm of law enforcement and is not an agent of the government. It is an independent reporting organization, served by and serving its members, the global investigative journalism community and the public.

The request from the EU Council to ICIJ comes just a few weeks after the governments of the U.S., U.K. and Australia announced that they have had – some of them from as early as 2010 – what appears to be largely the same data ICIJ obtained. The three countries said they were planning to share the information with tax authorities around the world upon request.

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