Revealing Hidden Connections in the Panama Papers with Tom Sawyer Perspectives (Part 2)

Tom Sawyer Software was a Silver sponsor of GraphConnect San Francisco on October 13th, 2016.

The Offshore Leaks Database Challenge

In our blog post from last week, we walked you through our Panama Papers example application built with our flagship product Tom Sawyer Perspectives, to discover hidden connections related to individuals indicted in the 2015 FIFA scandal.

In this post, we continue our investigations but focus on Kojo Annan, son of former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who was listed in the Panama Papers document that revealed his use of offshore accounts.

It’s important to point out that some offshore entities and trusts are legitimate. While their anonymous nature more easily facilitates money laundering, tax evasion, fraud and other crimes, any names revealed in the Panama Papers investigation and any connections discovered require deeper investigation to prove any wrongdoing. For more information, check out the official pages for the Panama Papers investigation and the Offshore Leaks database.

Uncovering Connections Using Tom Sawyer Perspectives

We begin our investigation by searching for Kojo Annan, which reveals a result with 11 connections. Next we begin to expand those connections, and as we do so, one name stands out, Mr. Laolu Saraki. We know there is a Bukola Saraki who is Nigerian Senate President, so this seems like an interesting area to do some additional research. We use the Google search feature available in our example application to look up information about Laolu Saraki, and discover he is brother to the Senate President.



We decide to directly search for the name Saraki to see if other connections to Kojo Annan or Laolu Saraki appear. Indeed, there are several matches but no immediate links to the Kojo Annan network.

We see two nodes with the name Toyin Saraki, who is wife of Senate President Bukola Saraki, and several names that do not appear to be related. We clean up the results by merging the two nodes for Toyin using our merge feature, and we delete the other non-matching results.

Then we begin expanding Mrs. Saraki’s connections to see if there is a link between her and her brother-in-law or Kojo Annan. We expand a few levels but there is still no connection.



We decide to turn back to Kojo Annan and further expand his network several levels, but still the two networks do not connect. As a last resort we expand an intermediary with 150 connections, and low and behold, the two networks connect!



A diagram of this size and complexity is a bit difficult to digest and see exactly how Annan and the Saraki family are connected, so we clean up the diagram by deleting unnecessary connections and periodically running the automatic symmetric layout in Tom Sawyer Perspectives. After a few minutes, the connection is crystal clear and is revealed even more prominently using our graph visualization circular layout.



The diagram clearly shows that Annan and the Sarakis are connected via a series of intermediaries, entities and people. This relationship and other prominent Nigerians named in the Panama Papers have sparked a number of investigations and allegations.

Bukola Saraki is the most prominent Nigerian embroiled in the Panama Papers investigation and is facing several allegations of fraud, corruption and failure to adhere to the code of conduct law as stated in an article by the Premium Times in April of 2016.

The Power of Tom Sawyer Perspectives

This example application and investigation highlighted the flexibility and power of Tom Sawyer Perspectives to build graph and data visualization applications to view and understand your Big Data.

Whether it’s members of an organization, elements in a network, systems in an aircraft or automobile, or vendors in a supply chain, our intuitive product federates data from many data sources and helps you quickly build powerful data and graph visualization and analysis applications with minimal programming.

Try our Panama Papers demonstration and many others for free at www.tomsawyer.com. Who knows what you may discover.