'Pandora Papers' expose offshore deals of Jordan's king, Israelis

• Author: JERUSALEM POST STAFF
• Published date: 04 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The Pandora Papers is the world's largest-ever journalistic collaboration, with over 600 journalists from 117 countries analyzing over 11.9 million documents, according to the ICIJ. The documents expose over 330 politicians from over 90 countries.

The documents, some of which date to 1970, were leaked from the confidential records of 14 offshore service providers that give services to wealthy individuals and corporations, allowing them to conceal their identities from the public and even regulators.

Holding a trust or company in a tax haven is not a violation of Israeli law, and the Israelis mentioned in the leaked documents may not have committed any crime.

The word Israel appears over 40,000 times in the documents, according to Shomrim, a nonprofit investigative journalism newsroom and ICIJ's partner in Israel.

There are 565 Israelis listed as final beneficiaries of companies, placing Israel in 16th place among all countries in the leak in terms of the number of beneficiaries. Ten of the billionaires in the Pandora Papers are from Israel, according to ICIJ, but some of the beneficiaries listed are relatively small businesses.

The Pandora Papers revealed that former Jerusalem mayor and current Likud MK Nir Barkat held shares in several companies and communicated through his lawyers with at least one of them when due diligence was conducted, until he was elected to the Knesset in 2019.

After his election, he transferred the shares to his brother Eli Barkat, despite the Ethics Committee requiring new MKs to sell or lease their holdings to a person who is not a relative.

Barkat also held shares in a large company that registered in a tax haven instead of in Israel. At the beginning of this year, the company in question expected that its profits in 2025 would stand at about $700 million, according to Shomrim.

Although Barkat stated during his time as Jerusalem mayor that he preferred to deal with public affairs and did not deal with the holding company owned by him and his brother, the leaked documents showed that, as part of due diligence, a series of documents and details were requested from the company's shareholders, which included Barkat.

The holding company, BRM, participated in 2007 in the initial capital raising for eToro, a social network for trading in the capital market, based in Bnei Brak but registered in the Virgin Islands, according to Shomrim. In March 2021, eToro announced that it would enter the NASDAQ at a value of about $10 m.

BARKAT'S...