The Network Structure of the Panama Papers

I have made the graph below with the data from the Panama papers made available two days ago. The original dataset was composed of entities, officers and intermediaries, and the links “subsidiary of”, etc. In order to make the network manageable (there were about 600’000 nodes), I have merged the nodes (entities, officers and intermediaries) by country. The nodes are sized by weighted degree, that is, the number of connections they possess throughout the network. The first network shows the nodes sized by in-degree, that is, how many connexions they receive. The countries that stand out are the usual suspects: Hong Kong, Samoa, the Cook Islands, the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, with Malaysia appearing as well. The second graph shows countries sized by out-degree (how many connections they send), which makes more countries stand out, potentially countries whose citizens are clients of the entities in the tax havens. Because of the heterogeneity of of the links (some countries are both senders and receivers) it is difficult to make a clear-cut judgement about what is represented.

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