Young Maltese man at centre of Offshore Leaks

A young Maltese man is one of a handful of journalists and web developers who helped to create Offshore Leaks, an international database exposing secret companies and funds in offshore tax havens. Matthew Caruana Galizia, 27, translated “big, very poorly constructed databases” into graphs that show the connections of every person or company involved. “We then took that structure and produced a web application that anyone can use to search and explore it. I did the majority of the work in that area,” he told Times of Malta. The database includes a number of Maltese names, companies, trusts and funds with connections to offshore tax havens. Mr Caruana Galizia, the eldest son of columnist Daphne Caruana Galizia, previously worked in web applications at the Financial Times and got involved in the project after attending a technology and journalism conference in London. The work began two years ago when a hard disk containing 2.5 million files was delivered to Australian journalist Gerard Ryle by an anonymous whistleblower. The files turned out to be internal documents from Portcullis TrustNet (PTN) and Commonwealth Trust (CTL). “These are agencies that provide a kind of turnkey...