The Financial Times broke it first.
Not the loudest that would come later, when the tabloids woke up and smelled blood. But at 5:47 AM London time, the FT published a twelve-hundred-word piece that changed everything simply by being careful. No screaming headline. No moral outrage. Just facts laid out like surgical instruments: offshore accounts in Panama, routing codes that terminated in São Paulo, signatures on documents that matched Graham Whitfield's known filings. The paper called it "a significant development in ongoing European financial oversight discussions." In the language of financial journalism, that meant: this is real, and it is fatal.
By 7:15 AM, the Guardian had picked it up. "Panama Papers Redux? How One Man's Offshore Empire Finally Cracked Open." They drew the parallel to Mossack Fonseca before most people had finished their coffee.
Then the tabloids landed.
