Global law firm Appleby has announced it is taking legal action over the Paradise Papers investigation.

Appleby, which has 10 offices around the world including Athol Street, Douglas, has confirmed it intends to sue The Guardian and the BBC over the use of documents it says were stolen in a cyber attack.

In a statement, Appleby said: ’Our overwhelming responsibility is to our clients and our own colleagues who have had their private and confidential information taken in what was a criminal act.

’We need to know firstly which of their - and our - documents were taken.

’We would want to explain in detail to our clients and our colleagues the extent to which their confidentiality has been attacked.

’Despite repeated requests the journalists have failed to provide to us copies of the stolen documents they claim to have seen.

’For this reason, Appleby is obliged to take legal action in order to ascertain what information has been stolen.’

The Guardian says it will defend robustly the legal action seeking to force the disclosure of the documents that formed the basis of its Paradise Papers investigation.

A spokesman for the newspaper said: ’We can confirm that a claim has been issued against The Guardian.

’The claim does not challenge the truth of the stories we published. Instead it is an attempt to undermine our responsible public interest journalism and to force us to disclose documents that we regard as journalistic material.’

Stories exposing the offshore world published by the Guardian and broadcast by BBC Panorama were based on 13.4 million files, including seven million documents from Appleby, that were obtained by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Appleby said its documents were obtained in a sophisticated cyber-attack, discovered in May last year. It was not a full-scale automated attack.