The story of a widow exposing worldwide fraud on a mammoth scale sounds like it could only be the stuff of fiction.
But Meryl Streep's Netflix film debut The Laundromat is based on a true story of 'history's biggest data leak' that exposed how the world's wealthiest people protected their millions.
The big budget movie, also starring Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas, is directed by Steven Soderbergh.
Streep plays widow Ellen Martin, who following the death of her husband, discovers she has been the victim of an insurance fraud and launches an investigation into what happens.
Premiering at the Venice Film Festival today, and launched on Netflix next month, it tracks her battle to find the truth and expose one of the world's worst frauds.
Oldman and Banderas play shady lawyers, while the cast also includes Sharon Stone and David Schwimmer.
But while it is sure to earn rave reviews, the true story behind the events on screen are darker than fiction.
In April 2016, 11 million confidential documents from secretive Panama law firm, Mossack Fonseca, were leaked.
The documents were leaked by an anonymous source to Bastian Obermayer, a German journalist in 2015.
The whistleblower named themselves simply John Doe and claimed he was leaking the documents because "I understood enough about their contents to realise the scale of the injustices they described".
After sharing the documents with journalists from 107 media organisations in 80 countries the painstaking work of analysing them began.
The first news stories about the scandal were published more than a year later, on April 3, 2016 and revealed how some of the world's wealthiest people had avoided paying billions in taxes.
Panama is a tax haven and many of the transactions were completely legal.
Along with some of the world's richest people, the list also included some of the most famous.
Among those named in the documents were Simon Cowell, Harry Potter star Emma Watson, Princess Diana's former butler Paul Burrell, Jackie Chan and Emilio Estevez.
Emma Watson insisted she had only set up the offshore firm for 'privacy'.
Sports stars including Kevin Keegan, Andy Cole, Lionel Messi, Nick Faldo, Tiger Woods and Nico Rosberg were also named.
The former Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, David Cameron's father, Ian, and Margaret Thatcher's son, Mark, were also included in the leak.
Mr Cameron’s late father Ian was a client of Mossack Fonseca when establishing Blairmore Holdings Ltd, a Bahamas-based investor fund.
Mr Cameron finally admitted he and wife Samantha bought their offshore shares holding from his father in 1997 for £12,497 and sold it in 2010 for £31,500.
The accounts show Mr Cameron made a capital gain of £9,501 on the deal. In 2010 he sold 114 shares on becoming PM, making a loss of £2,507.
Brexiteer Arron Banks, Heather Mills and hotelier Rocco Forte also had their names included in the leaked list.
The former PM of Iceland, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, resigned over the claims he had hid his millions offshore.
What the papers did reveal was how offshore tax havens help companies and wealthy people avoid and evade paying tax.
John Doe said: "The Panama Papers show beyond a shadow of a doubt that although shell companies are not illegal, by definition they are used to carry out a wide array of serious crimes.
"Income inequality is one of the defining issues of our time.
"The prevailing media narrative thus far has focused on the scandal of what is allowed and legal in this system. What is allowed is indeed scandalous and must be changed."
Included in the list were 12 national leaders and the trail even leads to Vladimir Putin.
His best friend, cellist Sergei Roldugin, was at the heart of a scheme where money from Russian state banks was hidden off shore.
In the aftermath of the revelations, an investigation was launched in Mossack Fonseca and the Panama Papers.
In February, 2017, founding partners of the firm, Mossack and Fonesca, were detained on Money laundering charges.
Both have been refused bail as they are deemed a flight risk.
By March last year the law firm announced it was ceasing operations because of the "irreversible damage" to their image as a direct result of the Panama Papers.
Heartbreakingly, one of the journalists at the heart of the investigation, Daphne Anne Vella, was murdered in a car bomb attack close to her home in October, 2017.
Eight people were arrested in connection with her assassination and three have been charged.
The renowned anti-corruption blogger, 53, was targeted as she left her home in northern Malta.
Detectives believe the killer detonated the bomb remotely with a mobile phone.
Vincent Muscat and two brothers Alfred Degiorgio and George Degiorgio have all denied murder.
She had filed a complaint to police a fortnight before her death after receiving personal threats to her safety, local media said.
She wrote a popular blog in which she relentlessly highlighted cases of alleged graft targeting politicians from across party lines.
- The Laundromat will land on Netflix on October 18.