FOR MONTHS, CORK native Eddie Sheehy had no idea what was in the more than 11 million documents leaked from law firm Mossack Fonseca that later came to be known simply as the Panama Papers.
Yet without his company, the mammoth investigation that sent shockwaves around the globe after its findings were revealed would probably never have been possible.
The documents, leaked last year by an anonymous source to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), exposed the hidden offshore financial dealings of some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people.
More than 80 reporters from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) combed through the files for over a year before publicly unveiling the networks of shell companies the elite used to conduct their business away from prying eyes.
To handle the reams of data in the millions of documents, the ICIJ turned to software from Australian company Nuix – a firm headed up by Sheehy.
The Irish connection
Sheehy grew up in Ireland and studied in University College Cork before moving to London to learn the investment banking trade. He later settle in Australia, where he worked with a number of businesses.
In 2006 he became chief executive of Nuix, then a fledgling three-person operation. Fast forward a decade and the firm has 400 employees across the world developing and selling its analytical platform, which was supplied to the ICIJ for free.
Nuix’s software is essentially a tool for making sense of large amounts of data. It was already used several times by the ICIJ including during its ‘offshore leaks’ investigation in 2013, which also examined the murky world of secret accounts.
Speaking to Fora, Sheehy said it was the director of ICIJ, Kerry-born journalist Gerard Ryle, who first approached his company shortly after the files were leaked to SZ.
However, no one at Nuix was aware of the potentially explosive material contained in the documents until they were published.
“Once the system was up and running after advice and training, they were doing it all themselves. We knew there was something up but that was it, we don’t know what is in our clients’ data,” he said.
“Basically, you point our software at any unstructured data like hard drives, mobile devices, emails, anything that contains content. What it does is look at the binary of the code, the basic 1s and 0s, and it breaks it down and makes it searchable in a way that is intuitive.”
Nuix’s software is normally used by huge multinationals to analyse data or by international state bodies to carry out large-scale investigations. Most of the process is automated, however the company also helps the investigators when needed.
Sheehy said everything from card names to email addresses and company names was searchable, effectively all the information that people “love to be able to search for”. It even offered “hints” as to where users should be starting their probes.
“We automate the vast majority of it, to start sorting data all you have to do is start ticking boxes as to what you want to get and our platform does the heavy lifting.”
The company’s technology also tackles one of the hardest parts of a large, data-driven investigation – trying to peer deep into files that aren’t readily searchable.
Sheehy said this was based on the software being able to find “magic numbers” in files, extracting attachments that contained images and then making these searchable as well.
Here, Nuix consultant Carl Barron further explains how the company helped examine the Panama Papers:
It took several weeks to analyse the 2.6 terabytes of data that were drip-fed out with the leaks. However, despite the scale of the operation, Sheehy said it was only an average-sized undertaking compared to some of the most far-reaching cyber investigations Nuix had been involved in.
“One of the biggest ones we ever did was with a financial institution, where there were 3.1 billion emails, 460 million Word documents and 360 million Excel files. This was actually almost small in the scheme of things,” he said.
He added that what set it apart was the painstaking way in which the ICIJ set about its work.
“With so many people interrogating one data set, the data was probably being used more and better than with the vast majority of data sets,” he said.
Sheehy said that we can expect more revelations in the coming weeks, adding that there is still unreported detail from the Panama Papers files.
“My understanding is that there will be more data related to companies and individuals who have been exposed,” he said.
You can find out more about how Nuix helped power the Panama Papers investigation here.
Written by Paul O’Donoghue and originally published on Fora, a new business publication for Irish startups and SMEs.
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