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Novel findings of hidden relationships in offshore tax-sheltered firms: a semantically enriched decision support system

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Abstract

Since the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released the Offshore Panama Papers Leaks Database (LeaksDB), researchers were able to access a graph database (GraphDB). This research article demonstrates that exploiting a challenging graph database like the Panama Papers can be performed using the Semantic Web capability (Ontotext Platform). In using these capabilities it also reports several interesting findings from GraphDB, such as the following: (1) there are more than 4000 companies registered in Cayman Islands but owned by Taiwanese people (or companies); (2) almost 50% of these offshore companies are claimed to be owned by people (or companies) in America, followed by Asia with 36%, then by Europe with 13%; (3) by far, the most connected Offshore agency is listed under the anonymous name “THE BEARER”; (4) “Mossack Fonseca” law firm played an intermediary role in 12 countries (Switzerland, Ecuador, Guatemala, Panama, United Kingdom, Brazil, Chile, Czech Republic, Israel, Peru, Singapore, and Thailand); (5)“Morgan Stanley” played some intermediary role in Asian countries (Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong); and finally, (6) countries such as China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have an immense number of related offshores entities owned by individual persons; whereas, countries such British Virgin Islands, Jersey, or Panama have an enormous amount of offshores entities owned by companies.

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(source: http://rawgit.com/Ontotext-AD/leaks/master/README.html)

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Notes

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Consortium_of_Investigative_Journalists.

  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossack_Fonseca.

  3. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/08/mossack-fonseca-law-firm-hide-money-panama-papers.

  4. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb-kills-panama-papers-journalist.

  5. https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers.

  6. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/05/revealed-queen-private-estate-invested-offshore-paradise-papers.

  7. https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/donald-trumps-commerce-secretary-wilbur-ross-and-his-russian-business-ties/.

  8. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/05/trump-commerce-secretary-wilbur-ross-business-links-putin-family-paradise-papers.

  9. http://ontotext.com/products/graphdb.

  10. http://wiki.dbpedia.org.

  11. http://www.geonames.org.

  12. Cayman Islands is a British overseas territory in the western Caribbean Sea.

  13. http://linkeddata.org/.

  14. GraphDB provides “a set of programming interfaces that exposes all database functionality as a REST API and it is fully compliant with the Sesame service API”.

  15. https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/#_ga=1.65493990.915262142.1464145650.

  16. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_%28Syntax%29.

  17. http://wiki.dbpedia.org/.

  18. http://www.geonames.org/.

  19. http://ontotext.com/knowledgehub/fundamentals/knowledge-path-series-5-rdf-ranking/.

  20. http://graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation/free/rdf-rank.html.

  21. http://graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation/standard/sameas-optimisation.html.

  22. https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/96909.

  23. http://graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation/standard/sameas-optimisation.html.

  24. http://graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation/standard/lucene-graphdb-connector.html.

  25. https://confluence.ontotext.com/display/GraphDB6/GraphDB-SE+Full-text+Search.

  26. GraphDB provides “a set of programming interfaces that exposes all database functionality as a REST API and it is fully compliant with the Sesame service API.”.

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  1. Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY, 42101, USA

    Lily Popova Zhuhadar & Mark Ciampa

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  1. Lily Popova Zhuhadar
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Correspondence to Lily Popova Zhuhadar.

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Zhuhadar, L.P., Ciampa, M. Novel findings of hidden relationships in offshore tax-sheltered firms: a semantically enriched decision support system. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 12, 4377–4394 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-019-01392-1

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