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Meet the startup that helped analyse and understand data in the 11.5 million documents of the Panama Papers

Panama Papers
The journalistic application was a more surprising one for Eifrém as the Panama Papers from last year shook the world with its revelations and ended up winning the ICIJ a Pulitzer Prize.

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Meet the startup that helped analyse and understand data in the 11.5 million documents of the Panama Papers

Popular personalities named include, Queen Elizabeth II, her son Prince Charles, U2 frontman Bono, music icon Madonna, Columbian singer Shakira, four-time Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton and India’s Shahenshah of Bollywood – Amitabh Bachchan.

In order to analyse the Panama Papers for investigative purposes, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) assigned Neo4j, a Swedish graph technology company to help interpret the data from the 11.5 million documents.

Neo4j has also been studying the latest installments of the Panama Papers – dubbed Paradise Papers – which consists of more than 13 million documents. Most which have been obtained from leading adviser on offshore affairs, Appleby.

Neo4j CEO and co-founder, Emil Eifrém, speaking to Swedish tech site Di Digital said, “For us the work has been incredibly similar to the one we did for ICIJ with the Panama Papers. We don’t own the data, we only help to process it.”



The startup helps bring datasets alive by establishing dots that connect the multiple datapoints. This helps companies make more sophisticated queries on it data in quicker time to apply it to real-world business use-cases. This could range “from helping NASA get to Mars faster to helping Ebay transform its customer shopping experience,” according to Eifrém in Business Insider Nordic.

“There is a tremendous amount of business value in understanding the connections in your data. That’s what Google has done, that’s what Facebook has done, that’s what LinkedIn has done – and as every company becomes a technology company, we’re helping all companies do the same.”

The journalistic application was a more surprising one for Eifrém as the Panama Papers from last year shook the world with its revelations and ended up winning the ICIJ a Pulitzer Prize.

With regard to the recently released ‘Paradise Papers’, some of the big revelation that Neo4j’s analyses have come up with include how Jared Kushner associate, Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire, helped state-owned Russian companies to invest in leading American social media companies like Facebook and Twitter.

One of the biggest names to have emerged from the Paradise Papers was the head of the British monarchy – Queen Elizabeth II. Allegedly, the Duchy of Lancaster, from whom the monarch receives income, held funds offshores. Other famous personalities named include, the Queen’s son, Prince Charles, U2 frontman – Bono, music icon Madonna, Columbian singer Shakira, four-time Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton and India’s Shahenshah of Bollywood – Amitabh Bachchan.


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