Why can’t I find some names in the database that appeared in the Panama Papers stories?

While the ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database opens up a world that has never been shown in this much detail, not every owner of a company that appears in the Panama Papers shows up in the public database. This is because that information is often buried in emails, power-of-attorney letters and internal notes of Mossack Fonseca employees and cannot easily be extracted in a systematic manner. In addition, Mossack Fonseca often failed to collect the necessary information about the real owners of companies, relying instead on banks and other intermediaries to keep track of that essential data. While we faced a similar situation with the original Offshore Leaks data, those original databases from Portcullis Trustnet and Commonwealth Trust Limited contained more ownership information.

On April 3, 2016 ICIJ published an interactive application with detailed information on dozens of politicians in the leaked files. In order to better tell those specific stories, ICIJ manually added information from Panama Papers documents about the politicians to this database. You will identify these records easily because they include a note that says “record manually added from leaked documents.” In those cases ICIJ only registered the information connected to the public figure and not that of the rest of the people that may be associated to an offshore entity, whose information could have been inside the documents.

This post originally appeared here.