The firm is denying everything: Mossack Fonseca co-founder Ramon Fonseca Mora tells CNN the reports are false and claims several of the parties named in the leak “are not and have never been clients of Mossack Fonseca.” The end result? A lot of money no one knows about. According to the ICIJ, the company once went so far as to remove paper records from its Nevada offices to protect its clients from discovery. Which makes sense-that’s why they go to Mossack Fonseca, which, according to a 2015 audit, knew the true owners of just 204 of 14,086 companies it had incorporated in the Seychelles. The documents provide a detailed view of how Mossack Fonseca routinely accepts to engage in business activities that potentially violate sanctions, in addition to aiding and abetting tax evasion and money laundering.Īccording to the ICIJ, some of the documents show that the banks, law firms and middlemen involved “often failed to follow legal requirements that they make sure their clients are not involved in criminal enterprises, tax dodging or political corruption.” Other documents examined by the ICIJ reportedly show offshore middlemen concealed suspect transactions.Īccording to Süddeutsche Zeitung, concealing the client’s identity constituted the primary goal in “the vast majority” of cases. Mossack Fonseca has founded, sold, and managed thousands of companies. The result is an offshore company whose true purpose and ownership structure is indecipherable from the outside. For an extra fee, Mossack Fonseca provides a sham director and, if desired, conceals the company’s true shareholder. However, at this price it is just an empty shell. Reports Süddeutsche Zeitung:Ĭlients can buy an anonymous company for as little as USD 1,000. But their use can also suggest the owner is trying to hide funds or disguise the terms of a transaction like a divorce or real estate acquisition.Īnd indeed, that appears to be the case for a large number of Mossack Fonseca’s clients. There’s nothing illegal, per se, about opening a shell company or using bearer bonds, and there are plenty of legitimate business reasons to do so. The documents analyzed so far largely relate to off-shore bank accounts established by Mossack Fonseca on behalf of its clients, which are said to include politicians, celebrities, a ton of very wealthy people, and quite a few criminals-both alleged and convicted. In a feat of impressive collaboration, coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), 100 news outlets publishing in 25 languages analyzed the records for a year before publication. The paper says the encrypted files came from an “anonymous source,” who apparently “wanted neither financial compensation nor anything else in return, apart from a few security measures” for what came out to 2.6 terabytes of data: the biggest leak of this kind of all time. The German paper Süddeutsche Zeitung obtained the documents, which reportedly include e-mails, PDFs, photos, and “excerpts of an internal Mossack Fonseca database,” dating from the 1970s up to this spring. On Sunday, a consortium of newspapers broke the news about the documents and records, apparently leaked from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which specializes in setting up offshore shell companies for its clients. How do you hide billions of dollars from the world when you’re one of the most famous people on…
'Biggest Leak in History' Reveals Corruption in World Leaders' Offshore Tax Havens What do heads of state, FIFA execs, billionaires, celebrities, and hundreds of their rich and powerful friends have in common? Quite a few things, I’d wager, but here’s something specific: They’ve all been named in the “Panama Papers,” the trove of 11.5 million records that give insight into how the rich and powerful hide their money abroad. Here's a few of the biggest names that have been revealed after the report published by International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.Photo composite: Jim Cooke, Photos: AP/ Getty Hundreds of world leaders, celebrities and billionaires have been exposed after the massive 'Panama Papers' leak revealed their shady offshore accounts through Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. Here's some of the most prominent people who have been tied to the Panama Papers. An anonymous source leaked the documents from Mossack Fonseca to German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung a year ago who then got hundreds of journalists to help investigate and publish the report. The documents, dubbed the Panama Papers, contains more than 11.5 million documents tied to Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. Earlier this month, a bombshell report published through the Washington, D.C.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists revealed dozens of world leaders, government workers and celebrities who were tied to offshore back accounts.
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