The Wigwe story broke this week like a revelation. The Pandora Papers offered the same map in 2021.

Every Monday, The Money Lens looks back at the previous week. The question it asks is always the same. What was the signal before the damage arrived?

This week's signal is three years old.

When The Londoner's investigation landed this week linking Herbert Wigwe to 106 London properties, Nigerian media covered it as a revelation. It isn't. Or rather, it's only a revelation if you agreed to forget what the Pandora Papers already showed.

In 2021, Finance Uncovered and Premium Times documented at least 233 London properties bought through offshore companies by 137 wealthy and influential Nigerians, with the bulk of purchases between 2010 and 2015. Politicians. Business figures. Public officials. Shell companies in secrecy jurisdictions. The same architecture. The same corridor.

The story ran. People were outraged. And then it stopped.

That's the signal the careful reader should have caught. Not the names in the Pandora Papers. The reaction to the Pandora Papers. The pattern was treated as individual scandal rather than systemic map. Nobody asked what institution made it routine. Nobody traced the professional services industry that packages this, prices it, and markets it to the wealthy. Nobody asked what changed when the names weren't politicians but bankers.

The UK transparency law that produced this week's Wigwe revelation was passed in 2022, one year after the Pandora Papers. Britain acted. Nigeria noted the outrage and moved on.

The signal in 2021 was that this system was durable, was legal, and was still running. A careful reader of the Pandora Papers would have spent 2022 and 2023 asking who else was in the data. This week, we're getting the answer.

What the Money Lens asks today is simple. The next disclosure is already in a database somewhere. What are you going to do differently with it when it arrives?