• The person who leaked the “Panama Papers” about major tax evasion and fraud around the world said he was afraid of Russian retaliation.
• In what was supposed to be John Doe’s first interview since the Panama Papers came out in 2016.

In an interview on Saturday, the person who leaked the “Panama Papers” about major tax evasion and fraud around the world said he was afraid of Russian retaliation.

Under the name John Doe, he told that he had proof that top Russian officials and their allies had done wrong financially, which helped pay for the war in Ukraine.

Spiegel asked him if he was afraid for his life, and he said, “It’s a risk that I live with, given that the Russian government has expressed the fact that it wants me dead.”

When Spiegel asked John Doe about tax havens used by “strongmen in autocratic regimes” he said that Russia’s leaders, who deny breaking the law, are said to use them.

“Putin is more of a threat to the United States than Hitler ever was, and shell companies are his best friend,” he said.

“Shell companies funding the Russian military are what kill innocent civilians in Ukraine as Putin’s missiles target shopping centres.”

He said that secret firms “make these horrors and more possible by removing accountability from society. But without accountability, society cannot function.”

He said that the Russian state-funded channel RT had shown a two-part documentary about the Panama Papers in which a character named John Doe “who suffered a torture-induced head injury during the opening credits”

“However bizarre and tacky, it was not subtle,” he said.

“We have seen others with connections to offshore accounts and tax justice resort to murder, as with the tragedies involving Daphne Caruana Galizia and Jan Kuciak,” he said, referring to investigative journalists who were killed in Malta and Slovakia.

In what was supposed to be John Doe’s first interview since the Panama Papers came out in 2016, he said he had no plans to come out of hiding.

“The Panama Papers involve so many different transnational criminal organisations, some of them with links to governments, that it’s difficult to imagine how it could ever be safe to identify myself,” he said.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) leaked a number of financial documents, including the Panama Papers.

The prime minister of Iceland quit because of what they said, and the leader of Pakistan also lost his job because of what they said.

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