News in detail

Explaining the "Panama Papers" to a 5-year-old

The "Panama Papers" scandal, which exposed worldwide offshore financial dealings, is the largest leak of information in history. Journalists around the world faced the daunting task of sifting through 2.6 terabytes of data from the tax haven Panama.

For a whole year, an international consortium of journalists worked on researching them and have now published their results. There were prompt political consequences like protests and calls for resignation in Iceland and censorship of the articles in China. But how to explain the scandal so that even children get it?

The social news aggregator Reddit.com has a popular thread called “Explain like I’m five” where complex phenomena are summerized in simple, understandable terms. The same has been done for the Panama Papers.



User DanGliesack explains how offshore accounting functions by breaking the topic down to children who go about hiding their piggy banks. Even some adults might find this playful explanation rather helpful.