Christian Wenande
September 22nd, 2016

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There’s something sinister going on in the shade of the palm trees (photo: Bryce Edwards)

A new considerable leak of documents from the Bahamas reportedly contains a long list of Danish names and companies registered on the tax haven island between 1990 and 2016.

The leak, which is similar to that of the Panama Papers earlier this year, contains about 1.3 million documents from the company registry on the Caribbean island, which is on the EU’s list of unco-operative tax havens.

The leaked documents were published by the ICIJ, an international network of investigative journalists, of which employees of DR Nyheder and Politiken are members.

“There can be commercial reasons to be anywhere in the world, but it’s odd that such low-populated states have so many companies,” Michael Bjørn Hansen, a tax lawyer, told DR Nyheder.

“Some companies can be legit enough, but there are also many that only exist with the purpose of hiding money.”

READ MORE: Danish banks linked to Panama papers

SKAT smells blood
Meanwhile, the tax authority SKAT is looking forward to going through the documents and fine-combing the 175,000 companies in the papers for Danish discrepancies.

“We are interested in whether there is some of this we can use in specific cases,” Jim Sørensen, a spokesperson for SKAT, told DR Nyheder.

“So there is no doubt this is interesting to us. The island is on the list we keep tabs on, but we don’t have much knowledge about the Danes involved.”