A former high-ranking official of the Japanese soccer association who served as a Cabinet adviser and the wealthy CEO of a telecommunications giant are among Japanese individuals whose names crop up in secret records collectively known as the Pandora Papers.

An anonymous source shared the vast trove of data with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), a Washington-based nonprofit news outlet.

The Asahi Shimbun has partnered with the ICIJ in cooperative efforts that led to exposes based on other documents known as the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers.

The Pandora Papers comprise 2.94 terabytes of confidential financial files that amount to more than 11.9 million documents and other records. They came from 14 offshore service providers that set up and manage shell companies and trusts in tax havens around the world.

One name that appeared in the Pandora Papers is Takeo Hirata, a former bureaucrat of what is now the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Hirata served as a special adviser to the Cabinet under both Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and his predecessor, Shinzo Abe, as well as director-general of the Office for the Promotion of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games under both Suga and Abe. Hirata resigned from the two posts in August.

Hirata is listed as sole director of Charles Inter Ltd., incorporated in the British Virgin Islands.

According to documents in the Pandora Papers, an agent of Hirata gave instructions to establish Charles Inter in 2004. The company, the documents note, was dissolved on April 17, 2008.

In 2002, Hirata retired as a bureaucrat after serving as director of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Division of the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy. The same year he became general secretary of the Japan Football Association, a post he held until 2006.

When interviewed by The Asahi Shimbun for comment, Hirata said: “Individuals from abroad, who I negotiated with concerning petroleum and soccer, frequently spoke about how funds are moved from one account to another, and I felt I would not be included as a colleague unless I had an understanding of such matters. That is why I wanted to know how to establish an account in the Caymans or other tax havens and what procedures were involved. But I never actually moved around any funds at all.”

Another individual whose name comes up in the Pandora Papers is Joji Hara, who manages an investment firm, but has in the past served as a special adviser to the Cabinet Office and acting chairman of a subcommittee of experts under the government’s Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy.

Hara is listed as a director of another company in the Virgin Islands listed as Technology Advisory Group LLC Inc.

According to documents in the Pandora Papers, Hara became a director in November 2000. While the documents show that a company in the Cayman Islands is the owner, Hara is listed as one of the “beneficial owners.”

In response to questions from The Asahi Shimbun, Hara said it was necessary to set up a company in Cayman or other places in a manner that met the institutional conditions of the countries concerned. This involved the need for compliance by lawyers and the world’s four major accounting firms. Hara said the Virgin Islands company was created in this way by an accountant to manage a venture capital firm in Britain.

The documents state the activity of the company as “investment holdings,” with Japan listed as the nation where that activity takes place. The document also states that the company’s estimated value of assets as of 2017 totaled $31 million (about 3.4 billion yen). However, Hara denied the company had any activity with that much in assets at that time in Japan.

He also said he followed the instructions of the auditing company to pay appropriate taxes promptly.

Masayoshi Son, the chairman and CEO of the Softbank Group, in 2009 acquired SAM Cayman Inc. in the Cayman Islands. The company is a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Son Assets Management LLC, which Son also heads.

In October 2014, the subsidiary acquired a Gulfstream jet and signed a contract with Wilmington Trust Co. of the United States to lease the aircraft. Wilmington Trust was made owner trustee of the private jet.

Representatives of Son said the arrangement did not constitute making use of a tax haven since the subsidiary’s income is included in that of the parent company based in Japan.

They also said that Son’s activities as an individual were beyond reproach and based on instructions from a number of experts in fields such as law, accounting and tax matters.

According to sources knowledgeable about aircraft leasing, major benefits of using tax havens are the ease of establishing a company and the cheaper costs involved.

“While it will depend on the use of the aircraft, there are also major benefits from the standpoint of maintenance for leasing the aircraft and registering it in the United States,” one source said.

Another “beneficial owner” of a company in the Virgin Islands listed in documents found in the Pandora Papers is a former executive of a chemicals company that went bankrupt a few years ago.

The Virgin Islands company was established to hold bankable assets of a foundation in Liechtenstein that was said to have assets with an estimated value of $12.7 million.

“The donation was made before the bankruptcy and I know nothing about what happened thereafter,” the former executive said.

(This article was written by Sotaro Hata and Toshihiro Okuyama, a senior staff writer.)

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For more stories on the Pandora Papers, visit the special website of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists at (https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/).