Everyone who follows the news knows the name Mossack Fonseca, the law firm that got hacked and had their customer records published on the Internet. They managed to put the term "shell companies' on the map of most millennials, at least for a short time.
BBC has a story on that today, with a new twist - it turns out that the firm did not know the owners of many of the shell companies it set up. Once they were paid for setting them up, the real owners changed and they could not find them. I didn't find that unusual, given the nature of the purpose of some of these companies - to hide money or stock ownership from someone else, including the law firm. As Mossack Fonesca pointed out, it was all strictly legal. Those with that information exposed determined that however legal it was to set one up, having it exposed was a greater sin than any of the business transactions of the shell companies. You can bet other law firms are looking at better security since this incident happened, but you can also guess it was too late and most of them still don't know it.
Although it has been a long time in coming, three months ago, the firm announced it was closing down, due in part to 'reputational damage' a casualty of its own business model that exposed China's Xi and family, Russia's Putin, and a number of friends of both to public review of where that money was going. The article has many of the other famous examples.
It is just another reason to fear disclosure of information as much as compromise to a third party.
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