Netflix is bringing the story of The Panama Papers to life
Netflix announced Tuesday that they are bringing to life the story behind The Panama Papers in a new movie with John Wells and Claire Rudnick Polstein producing.
The streaming service company has acquired the rights to the book “The Panama Papers: Breaking the story of how the world’s rich and powerful hide their money” written by German journalists Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer working alongside more than 370 journalists from more than 80 countries around the world.
About the Panama Papers – From Wikipedia: The Panama Papers are 11.5 million leaked documents that detail financial and attorney–client information for more than 214,488 offshore entities.The leaked documents were created by Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca; some date back to the 1970s.
The leaked documents illustrate how wealthy individuals and public officials are able to keep personal financial information private. While offshore business entities are often not illegal, reporters found that some of the Mossack Fonseca shell corporations were used for illegal purposes, including fraud, kleptocracy, tax evasion, and evading international sanctions.
“John Doe”, the whistleblower who leaked the documents to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, remains anonymous, even to the journalists on the investigation. “My life is in danger”, he told them. In a May 6 statement, John Doe cited income inequality as the reason for his action, and said he leaked the documents “simply because I understood enough about their contents to realize the scale of the injustices they described”.