What do Geraldton, WA and Mackay in Queensland have in common? Well, apart from being remote coastal towns, they also appear surprisingly often in the Panama Papers – the leak of Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca’s customer data.
The Panama Papers contain a wealth of fascinating revelations about Australians and their relationship with offshore tax havens. There are, of course, many legitimate reasons to retain a Panamanian law firm, and we are not implying any wrongdoing by the companies and individuals revealed in the documents.
There are 1409 Australian addresses listed in the Panama Papers, with state capitals featuring heavily. There were only a handful of addresses in all of the ACT, SA, NT and Tasmania, so we’ll skip the top lists there.
Sydney, 2000 is the nation’s most included postcode, being home to scores of legal and accounting firms. Notable for NSW though, is that the North Shore areas of Chatswood, St Leonards, Gordon and Lindfield are so highly represented, relative to only a few addresses in the affluent Eastern suburbs. Hurstville and Carlingford also make somewhat unexpected frequent appearances in the Mossack Fonseca customer database.
In QLD it’s the Gold Coast which dominates the top postcodes. Nerang, Surfers Paradise, Reedy Creek, Arundel, Eight Mile Plains and Southport fill the top postcodes. Sunnybank, Brookfield and Brisbane CBD are the Brisbane areas mentioned in the records, along with geographic outlier of Mackay appearing in 10 customer accounts.
Victoria’s top suburbs are a more predictable tour of the inner east, from Ivanhoe down to Brighton, from Toorak across to Doncaster. Overall Victoria has fewer addresses than NSW or Queensland, with even WA showing more offshoring interest.
WA’s surprise offshoring hotspot is Geraldton. The city is home to 15 residential addresses listed in the leak, which is more than Perth’s central 6000 postcode. Perth’s inner suburbs have a fairly even distribution of offshoring addresses after Geraldton. The leaks are now fully searchable online at the IJIC Offshore Leaks website. The data can be viewed by suburb or even by street address.
