Huge document dump called the 'Panama Papers' exposes offshore accounts of world leaders

The rich and powerful use elaborate shell corporations and offshore bank accounts to hide their wealth, according to stories released Sunday by an inteational group of joualists.

The Inteational Consortium of Investigative Joualism, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, spent a year combing through a cache of 11.5 million records detailing offshore holdings of some current and former world leaders, businessmen, criminals, celebrities and sports stars.

The trove of information was first leaked to the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung about a year ago. It is confident the material is legitimate.

"The Panama Papers” detail more than 214,000 offshore accounts set up from 1977 to 2015 by the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which has offices all over the world.

\"To our knowledge this is the biggest leak that joualists have ever worked on,\" Bastian Obermayer, a reporter for Sueddeutsche Zeitung told The Associated Press.

More than 300 joualists looked over the documents which include emails, spreadsheets, passports and corporate records. The stories they pieced together show how the powerful use banks, law firms and shell companies to hide assets.

The documents include information about Russian President Vladimir Putin, details about England"s gold heist in 1983 and corruption surrounding FIFA, according to The Hill.

Edward Snowden, who leaked classified information from the National Security Administration surveillance activities in 2013, called it the biggest leak in the history of data joualism.

Biggest leak in the history of data joualism just went live, and it's about corruption. https://t.co/dYNjD6eIeZ pic.twitter.com/638aIu8oSU — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 3, 2016