In India, the book has not been discussed too much. Perhaps because there are no specific Indian names in it. Yes, of course, the Indian journalist Ritu Sarin has been named as one who was in Munich for the main conference that the Süddeutsche Zeitung held in 2016, pre-publishing. While one reads the story of how two journalists of the German newspaper were approached by a whistle blower to reveal millions of pages of data on the offshore companies of the world, one is a little bemused. It is already an accepted fact that every rich man hides his money in offshore companies. If you don’t own one, you are NOT rich. the offshore holdings of, in the case of the slender volume, mostly the VIPs of the world, Presidents, Prime Ministers etc like UK’s David Cameron and Iceland’s Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson.

Of course, the whistle blower is called John Doe, a traditional British usage since before the days of Graham Green. For me, who finds spy stories and crime thrillers irresistible, after the three Stieg Larsson books, The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo, the murky world of financial crimes was unputdownable. The writing style is so simple that one would not believe, this is a real narrative, not fiction. As a journalist, it also tells the story of international journalistic collaborations. Most financial and political crime stories are exposed through collaboration. The latest from WikiLeaks is Archimedes, a computer software that attacks LAN networks, developed by the CIA, none other. WikiLeaks, founded by Sunshine Press is the brainchild of Julian Assange. an Australian computer programmer, publisher and journalist. Since 2006, that is for the last ten years now, we have been reading about whistle blower downloads, Chelsea Manning, the transgender soldier’s revelations about the USA’s war in Afghanistan, made the world shiver in 2010. Manning has been in jail since then. S/ he has just been released.Assange is a refugee in the Ecuadore embassy in London. But there have been other leaks since then, about other crimes. There is the American computer analyst whistle blower who provided the Guardian with top-secret NSA documents leading to revelations about US surveillance on phone and internet communications. Edward Snowden, who is now stranded in Moscow. In financial exposures, the Panama Papers talks of Offshore Secrets and the HSBC files, which the same Süddeutsche Zeitung team helped expose, with the collaboration of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, ICIJ. So the Panama Papers cases too are a worldwide collaboration of exposes on

Gunnlaugsson. Naturally, Vladimir Putin is very interesting, especially the connection to his high-value musician friend and his daughter’s wedding. Syria’s Assad is as revealing as the story of Blood Diamond and the book says, there are a zillion corruption and hiding stories. But naturally, all the dots connect to Putin and Assad and Russia’s role in the Syrian tussle. Now that Trump is US president and his connection to Michael Flynn whose links to Sergey Kislyak whose connection to Putin are known and the Trump Towers in Panama and other Latin American countries are no secret, one expects more discoveries of business deals between all the relevant parties. All this is news of the future, still to be unravelled from the 214,000 offshore company records that John Doe supplied in 2015-16, amounting to more than 2.6 terabytes of data.

India will be keenly watching what happens to neighbour Pakistan’s ‘democratically elected’ Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. He and daughter Mariam/Maryam (yes, the same one of: Thank u v much PM @ narendramodi for the beautiful shawl for my grandmother. My father personally delivered it to her. Mariam wrote this on the micro-blogging site, Twitter in May 2014 and got headlines in the Indian media. She attached a photograph of the shawl along with her comment) has been specifically named in the Panama Papers and is under investigation, ordered by the Supreme Court of Pakistan. Now that Sajjan Jindal’s connections with the Sharif family is public knowledge, will this be the keyhole entry for India’s sleuths to begin looking for India’s black money stashed abroad (much much more than the Rs 65,250 crore declared last year)? Of course there is FIFA and UFA corruption in sports stories and that of Lionel Messi of Argentina and his Dad, and the latest headline is how his double was arrested a few weeks ago, with police thinking it was Messi. It is surprising that India’s Premier League did not find place in the book. Nor any of India’s defence middlemen.

For us Indians, of great interest is the case of Gu Kailai, a Chinese former lawyer and businesswoman. She is the second wife of former Politburo member Bo Xilai, one of China’s most influential politicians until he was stripped of his offices in 2012. Gu was convicted of murdering British businessman Neil Heywood and was given a suspended death sentence. On a vist to the USA, Gu wrote, ‘They can level charges against dogs and a court can even convict a husband of raping his wife.’ Gu wrote that, ‘We don’t play with words and we adhere to the principle of “based on facts”... You will be arrested, sentenced and executed as long as we determine that you killed someone’. This is the story of the Chinese elite. India has its own elite, its own IPL and its own murder trail and its own critic of the West. India needs a journalist of the calibre of Snowden/ Obermayer/s to be able to link the dots. This trail already leads to the Don Dawood, to Pakistan, cricket and the Middle East. As Bob Dylan sings: Yes, how many times can a man turn his head. Pretending he just doesn’t see? The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind.

The answer is blowin’ in the wind. The law firm Mossack Fonseca is at the heart of the Panama revelations. It is obvious, an engineer within the system, like Snowden, presumably in his 30s, like Snowden, is John Doe. We may never know his name, given what has happened to Manning, Assange, Snowden etc in the last five progressive years of the 21st century. So, this story isn’t over yet. Pan MacMillan is the book’s distributer, read it just as an introduction to the world of ‘deals’ and wait for the world to take notice, which is yet to happen.