Political corruption, lies, deceit, fraud, scandals. These very words can bring a bad taste to anyone’s mouth, except for the people benefiting from them. From the Watergate scandal to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, the Panama Papers scandal holds many peoples lives from all over the world in the balance and plenty of money too. For this may be one of the biggest political corruption cases in the last century.

On April 3, the first published reports of the leaked information dubbed the “Panama Papers” came out to the public. It gives accounts of the tax evasion of companies by having fake offshore companies. Many heads-of-state were involved including the Prime minister of Iceland Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson and Prime Minister of Great Britain David Cameron.

The 11.5 million files of information known as the Panama Papers was leaked by an anonymous source known as “John Doe.” This source has kept his or her identity a secret out of threat of death.

The scandal is centered around the law firm called Mossack Fonseca. Through this law firm, clients hid billions of dollars in countries and states that have extremely low tax rates or non at all, also called tax havens.

“The cat’s out of the bag, so now we have to deal with the aftermath,” Founder of Mossack Fonseca, Jürgen Mossack said in response to the leaked information.

Prime Minister of Iceland Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson had resigned over this issue on April 5. The Prime Minister’s wife owned interests in an offshore company, Wintris, which was associated with Mossack Fonseca. When the company Wintris went into bankruptcy, The Prime Minister and his wife bought the company.

After the Panama Papers scandal came out, on April 4 the Prime Minister announced that he would not resign on live television and was quoted saying that the accusations were,”nothing new” according to icelandmonitor.mbl.is.com.

The Prime Minister claims that him and his wife have not benefited. The next day he announced his resignation.

The Prime Minister of Great Britain, David Cameron, is also associated with the Panama Papers. Cameron’s father Ian Cameron ran an offshore company named Blairmore Holdings through Mossack Fonseca that avoided British taxes for more than 30 years. When the papers were leaked, Cameron claimed that his family’s taxes were a private matter and that he did not benefit from the tax evasion of his father.

On April 6 he admitted that he held shares in Blairmore, but sold them before he became Prime Minister says theguardian.com. Investigations of how Cameron was involved with the Panama Papers Scandal is still on going. With the current opinion of how Cameron has ran the country from the people of Great Britain, this certainly does not help his image in any way.

Another famous leader that was named in the Panama Papers is Vladimir Putin. It is still not known the exact amount of money that Putin acquired from the scandal. The amount is ranging anywhere from one billion to two billion. But what is certain is that Putin has denied all allegations of association and has claimed that western media is full of “Putinophobia.” Putin has also claimed that the Panama Papers primarily target him and that they are a conspiracy forged by the CIA to destabilize Russia.

These examples are only a fraction of how widespread this scandal goes. There are about 36 countries from across the world that have politicians named in the Panama Papers not including the United States. But the IRS has asked any citizens of them to come forward if they have ties with the scandal before they figure it out from their own investigation.

With the unarguable evidence that is piling up against these powerful people, it shows that we cannot trust what we see on the outside of our leaders.