The Swedes in Paradise Papers


Paradise Papers consists of 13.4 million documents from the law firms Appleby and Asiaciti, as well as 19 companies in tax havens and territories with limited transparency. SVT has, in cooperation with the TT news agency, found 2,000 Swedes in the leaked documents. There are various reasons for being in the leak and it does not necessarily mean that you have done something illegal.

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The Swedes

So far we have been able to identify 1,180 of the Swedes in the leak.


What do we know about them?


Sex

87 percent are men. Only 158 of the 1,180 are women.


Age

Their ages vary greatly.


More than half of them are more than 50 years old.


There are five minors on the list – the youngest is 12 years old. Four of them appear in the law firm Appleby's customer registry linked to a family foundation in Bermuda and one is a shareholder in a company in Malta.


Income

Let’s look at their incomes. We didn’t find any income data for 177 of them.


Let’s remove them for now.


99 of the people left have reported no income for the year 2016. Those who had no income from regular employment can still have an excess of capital.


More than 400 people had a taxable income of up to 500,000 SEK (or about €51,000) for the year 2016. This group has an income in line with the average Swede. The median income in Sweden in 2016 was 270,000 SEK.


Nearly 300 people have reported an income of between 500,000 and one million SEK. They earn between twice as much and up to almost four times as much as the median income in Sweden.


153 people, approximately 13 percent, had an income of between one million and five million SEK. For a Swede with a median salary, it would take more than 18 years to earn five million SEK.


19 people had an income of between five million and ten million SEK.


Two of them are women.


Those with the highest income earned from 10.5 million and up to 61 million SEK in 2016. There are only men in this group, twelve of them.


Capital

In addition to income from salary you can also have earned or lost money on your capital, for example by selling shares. The sum of profits and losses is included in the tax declaration and becomes an excess or deficit of capital. 37 percent of the Swedes on the list, that is 438 of them, have reported a deficit of capital.


414 of them, 35 percent, have reported an excess of capital of up to one million SEK for the year 2016.


97 people have reported an excess of capital of between one million and five million SEK. Four of them are in the group with the highest income, and three of them had an income of more than 25 million SEK 2016.


32 people have reported between five and ten million SEK in excess of capital for the year 2016.


24 of them live in the Stockholm area and three are women.


22 people, including one woman, have reported an excess of capital of more than 10 million. Together, in 2016, they reported an excess of capital of almost 843 million SEK.


We are now looking at all of the 1,180 identified Swedes again. Most of them have one particular thing in common.


Malta

1000 of them are involved in companies in Malta, a country where it is not public which companies a person is involved in.


What are their roles?

We just removed those who don’t have any connection to Malta in our data. Let’s look at what roles the ones with Malta connections have in the companies.


Three of the thousand are so-called Legal Representatives of companies in Malta.


24 of them are Secretaries. In Malta, that is an administrative role in the company's management, responsible for the company's documents and contacts with the authorities.


495 people are Directors, which means that they are in the board of the company.


The remaining 478 individuals are Shareholders in companies in Malta. Some of them only own a small proportion of the shares in the company. Others own a majority of the shares and are thus the party that ultimately controls the company. 64 of the Shareholders are women. The average income was just over one million SEK for the Shareholders we have income data on.


Where are they?

Of the 1,180 Swedes we identified, 140 people are unsubscribed from the national address registry in Sweden. We find them mainly in Malta and in Portugal, but also in for example the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. Let’s remove them. Five of the persons live in Sweden but have no permanent address here. We will remove them as well.


The remaining 1,035 people are registered in Sweden. Proceed to the map to find out where. To avoid identification we show the centerpoint of the persons zip code and not their actual address.

In summation, we have identified 1,180 of the 2,000 Swedes found in Paradise Papers. The majority of them, 87 percent, are men. The ages vary greatly, the youngest is 12 years old and the oldest 84. Of those we have found an income for for the year 2016, almost 80 percent earned more than the median salary in Sweden for that year. The person with the highest income earned more than 61 million SEK in 2016. 1,000 of the people are involved in companies in Malta. 1,035 of the Swedes we identified in Paradise Papers have registered addresses in Sweden. Proceed to the map to see where. The map doesn’t show the address of a person, but the centerpoint of that person's zip code to avoid identification.


Ola Hjalmarsson

Linnea Heppling

Fredrik Edgren

Linda Larsson Kakuli



This is Paradise Papers

• Paradise Papers consists of 13.4 million documents from two law firms and corporate registers in 19 of the world's tax havens and territories with limited transparency.

• The leak first came to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The documents were then shared with the International Journalist Network, ICIJ, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, who together with 382 journalists from 67 countries reviewed the content. Three Swedish news organisations are part of the cooperation. Uppdrag Granskning, SVT News and the news agency TT.

• The data consists of documents concerning 180 different countries. It includes business documents, passports and e-mails. The information in the documents spans over almost 70 years, 1950 to 2016.

• Most of the leaked documents come from the Appleby Law Firm, which has offices in several of the world's tax havens. In addition to Appleby, documents have also been leaked from another law firm - Asiaciti Trust in Singapore.