Panama Papers
The Panama Papers (Panama Leaks) are a set of 11.5 million leaked documents detailing attorney–client information for more than 214,000 offshore companies associated with the Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider, Mossack Fonseca. The leaked documents contain the identities of company shareholders and directors associated with Mossack Fonseca and illustrate how wealthy individuals, including public officials, hide assets from public scrutiny. At the time of publication, the papers identified five then-heads of state or government leaders from Argentina, Iceland, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates as well as government officials, close relatives, and close associates of various heads of government of more than forty other countries. The British Virgin Islands was home to half of the companies exposed and Hong Kong contained the most affiliated banks, law firms, and middlemen.[1]
While the use of offshore business entities is not illegal in the jurisdictions in which they are registered, and often not illegal at all, reporters found that some of the shell corporations seem to have been used for illegal purposes, including fraud, kleptocracy, tax evasion and evading international sanctions.[2]
An anonymous source using the pseudonym "John Doe" made the documents available in batches to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung beginning in early 2015. The information from this unremunerated whistleblower[3] documents transactions as far back as the 1970s and eventually totaled 2.6 terabytes of data. Given the scale of the leak, the newspaper enlisted the help of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which distributed the documents for investigation and analysis to some 400 journalists at 107 media organizations in 76 countries.[4] The first news reports based on the papers, and 149 of the documents themselves, were published on April 3, 2016. The disclosure of the leak is estimated to have reduced stock prices by an unprecedented US$ 230 billion around the world.[5] The ICIJ plans to publish a full list of companies involved in early May 2016.[6]
Background
Tax havens
Ninety-five per cent of our work coincidentally consists in selling vehicles to avoid taxes.
No official definition exists, but a jurisdiction is typically considered an offshore financial center, less formally known as a tax haven, when its banking infrastructure:
- Primarily provides services to people or businesses who are not its own residents.
- Requires little or no disclosure of information when doing business.
- Offers low taxes.[8]
Customers may open offshore accounts for any number of reasons, some entirely legal and ethically irreproachable.[9] A Canadian lawyer based in Dubai noted, for example, that businesses might wish to avoid falling under sharia law if an owner dies.[10] Businesses in some countries may wish to hold some of their funds in dollars also, said a Brazilian lawyer.[11]
American film-maker Stanley Kubrick had an estimated worth of $20 million when he died in 1999, much of it invested in the 18th-century English manor he bought in 1978. He lived there the rest of his life, filming scenes from The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut there as well. Three holding companies set up by Mossack Fonseca now own the property, and are in turn held by trusts set up for his children and grandchildren.[12] Newsweek points out that since Kubrick was an American living in Britain, his estate would otherwise have had to pay taxes to both governments and might have had to sell the property to do so.[13] Kubrick is buried on the grounds along with one of his daughters and the rest of his family still lives there.[12][13]
Other uses are more ambiguous. Chinese companies may incorporate offshore in order to raise foreign capital, normally against the law in China.[14]
"The most obvious use of offshore financial centers is to avoid taxes", however, as journalists and researchers such as The Economist and the Tax Justice Network have previously remarked.[15][16] Igor Angelini, head of Europol's Financial Intelligence Group, just established in January 2016, said that the shell companies "play an important role in large-scale money laundering activities" and that they are often a means to "transfer bribe money".[17]
Law firms play a central role in offshore financial operations.[16] Mossack Fonseca is one of the biggest in its field and the biggest financial institutions refer customers to it.[7] Its services to its clients include incorporating and operating shell companies in friendly jurisdictions on their behalf.[18] They can include creating "complex shell company structures" that, while legal, also allow the firm's clients "to operate behind an often impenetrable wall of secrecy".[9] The leaked papers detail some of their intricate, multilevel, and multi-national corporate structures.[19] Mossack Fonseca has acted with global consultancy partners like Emirates Asset Management Ltd, Ryan Mohanlal Ltd, Sun Hedge Invest and Blue Capital Ltd on behalf of more than 300,000 companies, most of them registered in the British Overseas Territories.
Leaked documents also indicate that the firm would also backdate documents on request and, based on a 2007 exchange of emails in the leaked documents, it did so routinely enough to establish a price structure: $8.75 per month in the past.[20] In 2008, Mossack Fonseca hired a 90-year-old British man to pretend to be the owner of the offshore company of Marianna Olszewski, a US businesswoman, "a blatant breach of anti-money laundering rules" according to the BBC.[21]
The practice of parking assets in luxury real estate has been frequently cited as fueling skyrocketing housing prices in cities like Miami[22][23][24] and London, where housing prices have increased 50% since 2007.[25][26][27] Three quarters of Londoners under 35 cannot afford to buy a home.[27] Donald Toon, head of Britain's National Crime Agency, said in 2015 that "the London property market has been skewed by laundered money. Prices are being artificially driven up by overseas criminals who want to sequester their assets here in the UK".[27] In Miami, 76% of condo owners pay cash.[28] "There is a huge amount of dirty money flowing into Miami that’s disguised as investment," according to former congressional investigator Jack Blum.[28] A study by Andy Yan, an urban planning researcher and adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia, of real estate sales in Vancouver—also thought to be affected by foreign purchasers—found that 18% of the transactions in Vancouver's most expensive neighborhoods were cash purchases, and 66% of the owners appeared to be Chinese nationals or recent arrivals from China.[29] Calls for more data on foreign investors have been rejected by the provincial government.[30] Chinese nationals accounted for 70% of 2014 Vancouver home sales over $3 million Canadian.[31]
Oxfam blamed tax havens in its 2016 annual report on income inequality for much of the widening gap between rich and poor. "Tax havens are at the core of a global system that allows large corporations and wealthy individuals to avoid paying their fair share," said Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, "depriving governments, rich and poor, of the resources they need to provide vital public services and tackle rising inequality."[32] International Monetary Fund (IMF) researchers estimated in July 2015 that profit shifting by multinational companies costs developing countries around US$213 billion a year, almost two percent of their national income.[33]
International banking climate
The Tax Justice Network has called Panama one of the oldest and best-known tax havens in the Americas, and "the recipient of drugs [sic] money from Latin America, plus ample other sources of dirty money from the US and elsewhere", according to The Conversation.[34] Panama has been cited repeatedly in recent years as a jurisdiction that does not cooperate with international tax transparency initiatives.[34][35][36][37][38]
"This issue will surely be raised at the G20 summit," said Tomasz Kozlowski, Ambassador of European Union (EU) in India. "We need to strengthen international cooperation for exchange of tax information between tax authorities"[39]
Panama, Vanuatu and Lebanon may find themselves on a list of uncooperative tax havens that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) will re-activate in July 2016 at the request of the G20 nations, warned Le Monde, a French newspaper that participated in the investigation. Those are the only three countries that follow none of the OECD's three broad guidelines for international banking cooperation, which are:[40]
- information exchange on request
- a signed multilateral agreement on information standards
- a commitment to implement automated information exchange in 2017 or 2018[40]
The OECD, the G20, or the European Union could also institute another list for countries that are inadequate in more than one area. Countries meeting none of these criteria would go on the blacklist, such as Panama, Vanuatu and Lebanon. Countries that meet only one criterion would go on the greylist.[40] As of April 2016 this greylist would include nine countries: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahrain, Brunei, Dominica, Liberia, Nauru, Samoa, Trinidad and Tobago and the United Arab Emirates.[40]
Leak timeline and logistics
More than a year before the April 2016 release of the leaked documents,[41] an anonymous source who identified himself as "John Doe" offered German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) large caches of sensitive banking documents. The newspaper accepted and over the course of the following year received 2.6 terabytes of Mossack Fonseca documents about[42] 214,488 offshore entities.[43] The leaked documents numbered 11.5 million and were created between the 1970s and late-2015 by Mossack Fonseca.[7]
At John Doe's insistence, reporters communicated over encrypted channels only. Anonymity and an understanding that they would never meet face-to-face were his conditions for providing the documents. John Doe said his life was in danger but declined remuneration.[44][45] "There are a couple of conditions," he said. "My life is in danger, we will only chat over encrypted [lines]. No meeting ever."[46]
According to Süddeutsche Zeitung reporter Bastian Obermayer, the source said that he decided to leak the data because he thought that Mossack Fonseca acted unethically. "The source thinks that this law firm in Panama is doing real harm to the world, and the source wants to end that. That's one of the motivations," said Obermayer.[45]
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists helped organize the research and document review once Süddeutsche Zeitung realized the scale of the work required to validate the authenticity of the leak. Additional stories based on this data are in the works, and the full list of companies is to be released in early May 2016. They enlisted reporters and resources from The Guardian, the BBC, Le Monde, SonntagsZeitung, Falter, La Nación, German broadcasters NDR and WDR, and Austrian broadcaster ORF, and eventually many others.
SZ investigators Obermaier and Obermayer had concerns about security, both of the leaked documents and their data, but also about the safety of some of their partners in the investigation living under corrupt regimes who might not want their money handling practices made public So the stored the data in room with limited access on computers that had never been on the internet. To make it even harder to sabotage the computers or steal their drives, the journalists made them more tamper-evident by painting their screws with glitter nail polish.[47]
The sheer quantity of leaked data greatly exceeds the WikiLeaks Cablegate leak in 2010[42] (1.7 GB),[48] Offshore Leaks in 2013 (260 GB), the 2014 Lux Leaks (4 GB), and the 3.3 GB Swiss Leaks of 2015. For comparison, the 2.6 TB of the Panama Papers equals 2,600 GB.
About 400 journalists from 107 media organizations in 80 countries at some point received and analyzed leak documents detailing the operations of the law firm and its clients' shell companies.[7] After more than a year of analysis, the first news stories based on the documents were published on April 3, 2016, along with 149 of the documents themselves.[49] The data concerned the operations and workings of some 214,000 shell companies. Reporters sorted the documents into a huge file structure containing a folder for each shell company, which held the emails, contracts, transcripts, and scanned documents Mossack Fonseca had generated while doing business with the company or administering it on a client's behalf.[42] Some 4.8 million leaked files were emails, 3 million were database entries, 2.2 million PDFs, 1.2 million images, 320,000 text files, and 2242 files in other formats.[42][50]
Journalists indexed the documents using open software packages Apache Solr and Apache Tika,[51] and accessed them by means of a custom interface built on top of Blacklight.[51][52] Süddeutsche Zeitung reporters also used Nuix for this, which is proprietary software donated by an Australian company also named Nuix.[2]
Using Nuix, Süddeutsche Zeitung reporters performed optical character recognition (OCR) processing on the millions of scanned documents, making the data they contained become both searchable and machine-readable. Most project reporters then used Neo4J and Linkurious[51] to extract individual and corporate names from the documents for analysis, but some who had access to Nuix used it for this as well.[2] Reporters then cross-referenced the compiled lists of people against the processed documents,[42] then analyzed the information, trying to connect people, roles, monetary flow, and structure legality.[42]
U.S. banking and SEC expert David P. Weber assisted journalists in reviewing information from the Panama Papers.[53]
Data security
Mossack Fonseca notified its clients on April 1, 2016 that it had sustained an email hack. Two days later when the document leak became public, the firm dismissed any connection to the email hack, which it said had been limited in scope. Data security experts noted, however, that the company had not been encrypting its emails[51] and furthermore seemed to have been running a three-year-old version of Drupal with several known vulnerabilities.[51] According to Tech Republic, Drupal ran on Apache 2.2.15, from March 6, 2010, and worse, the Oracle fork of Apache, which by default allows users to view directory structure.[54] Some reports[55] also suggest that some parts of the site may have been running WordPress with an out of date version of Revolution Slider, a plugin that has suffered[56] from vulnerabilities in the past.
The leak and leak journalism
Gerard Ryle, director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, called the leak "probably the biggest blow the offshore world has ever taken because of the extent of the documents".[57] Edward Snowden described the release in a Twitter message as the "biggest leak in the history of data journalism".[58] The ICIJ also said that the leak was "likely to be one of the most explosive [leaks of inside information in history,] in the nature of its revelations".[59]
"This is a unique opportunity to test the effectiveness of leaktivism", said Micah White, co-founder of Occupy, "... the Panama Papers are being dissected via an unprecedented collaboration between hundreds of highly credible international journalists who have been working secretly for a year. This is the global professionalization of leaktivism. The days of WikiLeaks amateurism are over."[60]
WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic investigative journalist who worked on Cablegate in 2010, said withholding some documents for a time does maximise the leak's impact, but called for full online publication of the Panama Papers eventually.[61] A tweet from WikiLeaks criticized the decision of the ICIJ to not release everything for ethical reasons: "If you censor more than 99% of the documents you are engaged in 1% journalism by definition."[62]
Clients of Mossack Fonseca
Reports from April 3 noted the law firm's connections to high-ranking political figures and their relatives, celebrities and business figures.[7][63][64]
The names of several national leaders appear in the documents, including presidents Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, and the Prime Minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson.[63] Former heads of state mentioned in the papers include Sudanese president Ahmed al-Mirghani; the Emir of Qatar Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani; prime ministers Bidzina Ivanishvili of Georgia, Ayad Allawi of Iraq, and Ali Abu al-Ragheb of Jordan; former prime ministers Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani of Qatar, Pavlo Lazarenko of Ukraine,[63] and Ion Sturza of Moldova.[65]
The leaked files identified 61 family members and associates of prime ministers, presidents and kings,[66] including the deceased father of British prime minister David Cameron; the brother-in-law of China's paramount leader Xi Jinping;[63] the son of Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak;[63] the children of Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif;[63] the children of Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev;[63] Clive Khulubuse Zuma, the nephew of South African president Jacob Zuma;[67] Nurali Aliyev, the grandson of Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev;[63] Mounir Majidi, the personal secretary of Moroccan king Mohammed VI;[63] Kojo Annan, the son of former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan;[63] Mark Thatcher, the son of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher;[68] and the "favourite contractor" of Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto.[63]
Other clients included less-senior government officials and their close relatives and associates, from over forty countries.[63]
FIFA
Many individuals mentioned in the Panama Papers are connected with the world governing body of association football, FIFA, including the former president of CONMEBOL Eugenio Figueredo;[69] former President of UEFA Michel Platini;[70] former secretary general of FIFA Jérôme Valcke;[70] Argentine player for Barcelona Lionel Messi; and, from Italy, the head manager of Metro, Antonio Guglielmi.[69]
The leak also revealed an extensive conflict of interest between a member of the FIFA Ethics Committee and former FIFA vice president Eugenio Figueredo.[69] Swiss police searched the offices of UEFA, European football's governing body, after the naming of former secretary-general Gianni Infantino as president of FIFA. He had signed a television deal while he was at UEFA with a company called Cross Trading, which the FBI has since accused of bribery. The contract emerged among the leaked documents. Infantino has denied wrongdoing.[71]
Investigations
The anonymity of offshore shell companies can also be used to circumvent international sanctions, and more than 30 Mossack Fonseca clients were at one time or another blacklisted by the US Treasury Department, include businesses linked to senior figures in Russia, Syria and North Korea.[72]
Three Mossack Fonseca companies started for clients of Helene Mathieu Legal Consultants were later sanctioned by the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Pangates International Corporation was accused in July 2014 of supplying the government of Syria with "a large amount of specialty petroleum products" with "limited civilian application in Syria." The other two, Maxima Middle East Trading and Morgan Additives Manufacturing Co, and their owners Wael Abdulkarim and Ahmad Barqawi, were said to have "engaged in deceptive measures" to supply oil products to Syria.[73]
Mossack Fonseca also ran six businesses for Rami Makhlouf, cousin of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, despite US sanctions against him.[74] Internal Mossack Fonseca documents show that in 2011 Mossack Fonseca rejected a recommendation by their own compliance team to sever ties to Mr. Makhlouf. They agreed to do so only months later. The firm has said it never knowingly allowed anyone connected with rogue regimes to use its companies.[72]
DCB Finance, a Virgin Islands-based shell company founded by North Korean banker[75] Kim Chol-sam and British banker Nigel Cowie[76] also ignored international sanctions and continued to do business with North Korea with the help of the Panamanian firm. The US Department of the Treasury in 2013 called DCB Finance a front company for Daedong Credit Bank and announced sanctions against both companies for providing banking services to North Korean arms dealer Korea Mining and Development Trading Corporation,[75] attempting to evade sanctions against that country, and helping to sell arms and expand North Korea's nuclear weapons programme. Cowie said the holding company was used for legitimate business and he was not aware of illicit transactions.[76]
Prime Minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif's three children--Mariam Safdar, Hasan and Hussain Nawaz Sharif—-are among over 200 members of the Pakistani elite listed in the Panama Papers as owners of offshore companies in a tax haven.[78]
Police raided the São Paulo offices of Mossack Fonseca in January 2016, seeking records about offshore companies the firm opened for two former executives of Petróleo Brasileiro S.A. (Petrobras) who were convicted in 2015 of corruption and money laundering. Police say the companies were used to hide illegally diverted funds.[79]
Actor Jackie Chan is mentioned in the leaked documents as a shareholder in six companies based in the British Virgin Islands.[80]
Beneficiaries of the Brink's-Mat robbery
Over £10 million of cash from the sale of the gold stolen in the 1983 Brink's-Mat robbery was laundered, first unwittingly by and later with the complicity of Mossack Fonseca, through a Panamanian company, Feberion Inc, set up on behalf of an unnamed client twelve months after the robbery. The money was put through Feberion, which had issued bearer shares only, and other front companies, via banks in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Jersey, and the Isle of Man. Two nominee directors from Sark were appointed to Feberion by Jersey-based offshore specialist, Centre Services.[81] The offshore firms served to recycle the funds through transactions in land and property in the United Kingdom.[81] Although the metropolitan police raided the offices of Centre Services in late 1986 in cooperation with the Jersey authorities where they seized papers and the two Feberion bearer shares, it wasn't until 1995 that Brink's-Mat's solicitors were finally able to take control of Feberion and the assets.[81]
Mossack Fonseca companies
Mossack Fonseca has managed more than 300,000 companies over the years,[18] with the number of active companies peaking at over 80,000 in 2009. Over 210,000 companies in twenty-one jurisdictions figure in the leaks. More than half were incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, others in Panama, the Bahamas, the Seychelles, Niue, and Samoa. Mossack Fonseca's clients have come from more than 100 countries. Most of the corporate clients were from Hong Kong, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Panama, and Cyprus. Mossack Fonseca worked with more than 14,000 banks, law firms, incorporators, and others to set up companies, foundations, and trusts for their clients.[82] Some 3,100 companies listed in the database appear to have ties to US offshore specialists, and 3,500 shareholders of offshore companies list US addresses.[83] Mossack Fonseca has offices in Nevada and Wyoming.[84]
The leaked documents indicate that about US$2 trillion has passed through the firm's hands.[85] Several of the holding companies that appear in the documents did business with sanctioned entities, such as arms merchants and relatives of dictators, while the sanctions were in place. The firm provided services to a Seychelles company named Pangates International, which the US government believes supplied aviation fuel to the Syrian government during the current civil war, and continued to handle its paperwork and certify it as a company in good standing, despite sanctions, until August 2015.[74]
More than 500 banks registered nearly 15,600 shell companies with Mossack Fonseca, with HSBC and its affiliates accounting for more than 2,300 of the total. Dexia and J. Safra Sarasin of Luxembourg, Credit Suisse from the Channel Islands and the Swiss UBS each requested at least 500 offshore companies for their clients.[82] An HSBC spokesman said, "The allegations are historical, in some cases dating back 20 years, predating our significant, well-publicized reforms implemented over the last few years."[86]
Mossack Fonseca responses
In response to queries from the The Miami Herald and ICIJ, Mossack Fonseca issued a 2,900-word statement identifying legal and compliance regimes that reduce the ability to use offshore companies for tax avoidance and total anonymity. They cited the FATF protocols which require identification of the ultimate beneficial owners of all companies (including offshore companies) to open accounts and transact business.
The Miami Herald printed the statement with an editor's note that said it "did not address any of the specific due diligence failings uncovered by reporters".[87]
On Monday, April 4, Mossack Fonseca released a statement: "Our industry is not particularly well understood by the public, and unfortunately this series of articles will only serve to deepen that confusion. The facts are these: while we may have been the victim of a data breach, nothing we've seen in this illegally obtained cache of documents suggests we've done anything illegal, and that's very much in keeping with the global reputation we've built over the past 40 years of doing business the right way."
Firm co-founder Ramón Fonseca Mora told CNN that the information published is false and full of inaccuracies and that parties "in many of the circumstances" cited by the ICIJ "are not and have never been clients of Mossack Fonseca." The firm provided longer statements to ICIJ.[88] Fonseca also said that the company always operated within the law and had been hacked.[89]
In its official statement[90] Mossack Fonseca suggested that responsibility for potential legal violations may lie with other institutions given that:
approximately 90% of our clientele is comprised of professional clients... who act as intermediaries and are regulated in the jurisdiction of their business. These clients are obliged to perform due diligence on their clients in accordance with the KYC and AML regulations to which they are subject.
In an interview that Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca gave to Bloomberg, Mossack said: "The cat's out of the bag, so now we have to deal with the aftermath."[91]
Ramón Fonseca said the leak was not an "inside job"—the company had been hacked by servers based abroad. It filed a complaint with the Panamanian attorney general's office.[92]
On April 7, 2016 Jürgen Mossack resigned from Panama's Council on Foreign Relations (Conarex),[93][94] even though he was not officially serving at the time.[95] His brother Peter Mossack still serves as honorary Consul of Panama as he has since 2010.[96][97][98][99]
Responses in Panama
At 5:00am on April 3, after the first release of the news, Ramón Fonseca Mora (co-founder of Mossack Fonseca) appeared on a television interview in the local channel TVN, defending himself against the allegations. He claimed that he "was not responsible nor he had been accused in any tribunal [tried in any court]".[100] Furthermore, he claimed that the firm was victim of a hack and that he had no responsibility of the use that their clients gave the offshore companies that they purchased from Mossack Fonseca, and that those companies were legal under Panamanian law.[100] Later that day, a representative of the Independent Movement (MOVIN)[note 1] called for calm, and expressed hope that the Panamanian justice system would not allow the culprits to go without impunity.[100] These declarations drove the people to join forces as the idea was put that it was an attack to the Panamanian service platform. Similar declarations by the Chancellor, Isabel Saint Malo and the Minister of Finance Dulcidio de la Guardia followed up in the next couple of days.
On April 8, the President of Panama responded negatively to France's proposal to include Panama in a list of countries that did not cooperate with the information exchange.[101]
The Financial Times indicated that Dulcidio de la Guardia, a former offshore specialist who worked at Morgan & Morgan (a rival of Mossack Fonseca) says the legal but often "murky" niche of establishing offshore accounts, firms and trusts makes up "less than half a percentage point" of Panama's GDP and later in the article the quote seemed to indicate that it was an attack because of the high level of economic growth that the country had shown.[102]
By April 8, new material on the news highlighting evidence of tax evasion by many high level individuals had forced the government to understand the issue of Tax Evasion as different from an attack to the country. The president had met on Wednesday April 7, with CANDIF, a committee of representatives from the different sectors of the economy which include the Chamber of Commerce, Chamber of Industry and Agriculture, the National Lawyers Association, the International Lawyers Association, the Banking Association and the Stock Exchange and entered a full crisis management mode.[103] He announced the creation of a new judiciary tribunal and a high level commission lead by Nobel Price Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.
Isabel Saint Malo de Alvarado, Vice President of Panama, said in an op-ed piece published April 21 in The Guardian that President Juan Carlos Varela and his administration have strengthened Panama's controls over money-laundering in the twenty months they have been in power, and that "Panama is setting up an independent commission, co-chaired by the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, to evaluate our financial system, determine best practices, and recommend measures to strengthen global financial and legal transparency. We expect its findings within the next six months, and will share the results with the international community."[104]
The Procuraduría de la Nación announced that it will investigate Mossack Fonseca and the Panama papers.[105] In reaction to France re-listing Panama as a tax haven, Minister of the Presidency Alvaro Alemán categorically denied that Panama is a tax haven, and said the country would not be a scapegoat. He criticized as disrespectful and irresponsible statements by Secretary General of the OECD José Ángel Gurría and French Minister of Finance Michel Sapin, saying that news reports speak of 21 jurisdictions, but Panama was singled out.[106] Alemán said that talks have started with the French ambassador in Panama.[107]
Eduardo Morgan of the Panamanian firm Morgan & Morgan accused the OECD of starting the scandal to avoid competition from Panama for the interests of other countries.[108] The Panama Papers affect the image of Panama in an unfair manner and are not the result of an investigation, but a hack, said Adolfo Linares, president of the Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Agriculture of Panama (Cciap).[109]
The Colegio Nacional de Abogados de Panama (CNA) urged the government to sue anyone who has affected the country's image by linking the Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca to the creation of companies to move capital and evade taxes.[110] Political analyst Mario Rognoni said that Panama is most affected by the scandal, and the world perceives it as a tax haven. The government of President Juan Carlos Varela might become implicated if he tries to cover up for those involved, Rognoni said.[111]
Economist Rolando Gordon said the affair hurts Panama, which has just emerged from the greylist of the FATF. The US could ask Panama to modify its laws, he said, adding that each country, especially Panama, must conduct investigations and determine whether in fact illegal or improper acts were committed.[112] Panama's Lawyers Movement said the Panama Papers affair was a 'cyber bullying or international cyberterrorism' scandal and called a press conference to condemn the attack on the brand 'Panama'. President Fraguela Alfonso said there is no doubt that it is a direct attack on the country's financial system.'I invite all organized forces of the country to create a great crusade for the rescue of the country's image," he said. He said that Panama is not a tax haven and Panamanian corporations are widely used by the Panamanians. The law firm Rubio, Álvarez, Solís & Abrego also reacted and in a press release said that "In recent decades Panama has been in the most important financial and service centers of Latin America and the entire world. As a result, all kinds of attacks on our service system have been attempted."[113]
Offshore companies are legal, said Panamanian lawyer and former controller of the Republic Alvin Weeden; illegality arises when they are used for money laundering, arms smuggling, terrorism, or tax evasion.[114]
On April 12, in an operation of the newly formed Second Specialized Prosecutor against Organized Crime, and supported by the Panamanian police, Panamanian prosecutors raided Mossack Fonseca and searched their Bella Vista offices. Official sources from the Procuraduría de la Nación confirmed the search was part of the investigation initiated by the Panama Papers. The Attorney General's office issued a press release following the raid, which lasted 27 hours,[115] stating that the purpose was "to obtain documents relevant to the information published in news articles that establishes the possible use of the law firm in illegal activities."[116]
On April 22 the same unit raided another Panama location and "secured a large amount of evidence."[115]
The board of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) requested an investigation of Ramón Fonseca Mora and asked that the name of Panama be defended. Benicio Robinson, president of the PRD, said Fonseca Mora has to go to the Public Ministry to clarify the situation because it is tarnishing the reputation of Panama and its financial and services center'.[117]
Virgilio Periñan Herrera said that his company is not an offshore company. Periñán said his company Global Business Development is not an offshore company, or a ghost company. He said that it operates in the Republic of Panama and is taxed to the national treasury. He said that it was created in the firm Mossack & Fonseca.[118]
Former presidential candidate Ruben Blades notes the way coverage has stigmatized Panama as a tax haven. Blades stressed that beyond the public ridicule this looks like an action intended to harm, denigrate and to bog down the name of Panama. He stressed that the intention is to promote financial interests of countries envy the growth and success of the country, and try to regain its dominance in the markets, not for errors of Panama, but for their own failures. Blades says Mossack Fonseca does not represent the country, but is a legal company operating in and from Panama.[119]
On April 25, a meeting of Panamanian Minister of Finance, Dulcidio de la Guardia and his counterpart Michel Sapin, resulted in an agreement under which Panama will provide all information about French nationals with taxable assets in the country.[120][121]
Allegations, reactions, and investigations
Europe
European Union
Many senior EU figures have been implicated in the Panama Papers scandal.[122] The European Commissioner for Taxation, Pierre Moscovici, has said that the European Union as a whole had a "duty" to prevent the kind of tax avoidance uncovered in the Panama Papers scandal. Moscovici told reporters the use of offshore companies to hide what he called "shocking amounts" of financial assets from tax authorities was "unethical". He estimated that the tax shelters resulted in an annual loss of some €1 trillion in public finances, adding that the European Commission attempted to tighten tax rules across the union since November 2014 due to the "LuxLeaks" tax avoidance scandal (also revealed by the ICIJ), and hoped the extent of the Panama Papers revelations would spur countries to action.[123]
In a 2013 letter unearthed by the Financial Times to the then president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron said that offshore trusts should not automatically be subject to the same transparency requirements as shell companies.[124][125]
Cyprus
Central Bank of Cyprus officially declared: "With regard to press reports citing leaked documents, known as the Panama Papers, the Central Bank of Cyprus announces that it is assessing the information to the extent that it may concern the Cypriot banking system and taking, where necessary, appropriate action."[126] A Cypriot online paper said "The Cyprus link stems from the fact that Fonseca runs an office in Cyprus and, more specifically, in Limassol. In a chart, the leaks name Cyprus as a tax haven (countries that offer little or no tax), although it has a corporate tax rate of 12.5%, the same as Ireland."[126]
France
French financial prosecutors opened a probe, and President François Hollande declared that tax evaders would be brought to trial and punished.[127] Also as a result of the leak, France restored Panama to its list of tax havens, from which Panama had recently been removed.[128]
Former French budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac, who spearheaded a crackdown on tax fraud while in office, was a client of Mossack Fonseca and through them owned a Seychelles company named Cerman Group Limited, incorporated in 2009. When France investigated 2013 allegations by Mediapart that in 2000 Cahuzachad held undeclared assets in an account first in Switzerland, then Singapore, he resigned his cabinet post, protesting his innocence,[129] but admitted a few months later that he indeed had hidden €600,000 in a UBS account and then moved it to keep it hidden, "while continuing to lead France's clampdown on tax evasion."[130] The French Socialist Party unanimously voted to expel him a week later.[131] On the heels of the April 2013 "Cahuzac affair", President Hollande created the parquet national financier (PNF),a judiciary investigation unit specializing in large-scale fraud and corruption investigations.[132]
Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder and long-time leader of the far-right-wing Front National (FN) and now a member of the European Parliament, already was the subject, along with his daughter Marine Le Pen and his staff, of a PNF tax fraud investigation. Drawing official scrutiny were an undeclared HSBC account containing €2.2m in gold and coins, managed from Geneva by an aide through a trust based in the British Virgin Islands which was closed and then moved to the Bahamas in 2014; allegations of overbilling;[133] misuse and comingling of campaign funds;[133][134] and tax evasion. Jean-Marie Le Pen is also suspected of using his European Parliament funds for the campaign and administrative expenses of his French political party.[135] Jean-Marie Le Pen is mentioned in the documents, along with his daughter Marine Le Pen, who is the current party leader, and Frederic Chatillon, an FN insider who is also a close friend of Marine. Among the three of them, they may have hidden as much as a million pounds in offshore accounts.[136]
Iceland
On April 5, 2016, Prime Minister of Iceland Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson announced his resignation.[137] Reykjavík City Council Member Júlíus Vífill Ingvarsson resigned earlier in the day.[138]
Shortly after initial reports of Sigmundur Davíð's resignation, the Prime Minister's office in Iceland issued a statement to the international press saying that Sigmundur Davíð has not resigned, but rather stepped aside for an unspecified amount of time and will continue to serve as the Chairman of the Progressive Party.[139]
Icelandic prime minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson
Anna Sigurlaug Pálsdóttir, wife of Icelandic prime minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, holds an interest in failed Icelandic banks through bonds owned by offshore company Wintris Inc. Sigmundur Davíð, elected after the 2008 banking collapse in Iceland, had pledged to clean up corruption in the banking system. The couple bought Wintris in 2007 from Mossack Fonseca through the Luxembourg branch of Landsbanki.[140] But Sigmundur Davíð did not declare his interest in the company when he entered parliament in 2009, and did not sell his 50 percent of Wintris to his wife—for US$1—until eight months later,[57] the day before a new law took effect that would have required him to declare the conflict of interest.[141]
Contacted by ICIJ journalists ahead of publication, the couple issued statements about journalist encroachment on their private lives and insisted their disclosures were complete and the company paid taxes in Iceland. However, since his position involved negotiating with bank creditors and his wife as a bondholder was among them, citizens felt he had a strong conflict of interest. Calls for a snap election in the Althing (the Icelandic Parliament) were expected,[142] but following the papers' release, Sigmundur Davíð faced calls for his resignation instead. Between 22,000 and 24,000 people attended an anti-government protest outside parliament on April 4, 2016.[143]
On April 4, 2016, Sigmundur Davíð announced on live television that he would not resign in the wake of the Panama Papers revelations, calling their content "nothing new".[144] He said he had not broken any rules and that his wife did not benefit financially from his decisions.[57] However, on April 5, he asked the President of Iceland to dissolve parliament and call for a general election. The president refused, saying it was not clear that other parties supported the move.[145] Sigmundur Davíð announced his resignation later on April 5, although later press statements from his office suggested that he merely "stepped aside" for a time.[137][139]
Businesswoman Ingibjörg Pálmadóttir and her husband Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson have, for several years, financed their business dealings through a Panamanian company, Guru Invest, which owns shares in retailer Sports Direct through Rhapsody Investments (Europe), based in Luxembourg.[146] Guru Invest paid around 16 million to Glitnir bank whem it crashed and loaned 100 million to Þú Blásól through an offshore company named Jovita. Asked by journalists at Kjarninn where that money came from, Ingibjörg did not reply.[146]
Ingibjörg is the primary owner of the 365 media group, which owns the Icelandic news outlets Vísir.is, television channel Stöð 2 and radio stations Bylgjan, X-ið and FM957, none of which seem to be reporting this disclosure.[146]
Italy
On April 6, 2016, Italy's Procura of Turin ordered the Guardia di Finanza to investigate the 800 Italians contained in the Panama Paper's documents.[147]
Former long-time Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who had been already convicted for tax evasion and expelled from the Parliament, was cited on the list.[148]
Other notable people whose names are mentioned in the Papers include entrepreneurs Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, Flavio Briatore, Adriano Galliani, and actor Carlo Verdone.[149]
An investigation by ICIJ partner The Namibian found that the imprisoned Vito Roberto Palazzolo shielded his finances Italian, Namibian and South African authorities with at least shell companies in the British Virgin Islands set up by a German banker in Hong Kong, Wolf-Peter Berthold, which they also used to transfer control of Palazzolo's assets to his son.[150]
Malta
Konrad Mizzi, the Minister for Energy and Water Conservation, is listed in the Panama Papers related to a secretive company in Panama.[151][152][153][154][155][156][156]
Keith Schembri, chief of staff for Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, also has a secret company in Panama.[155]
Norway
The Norwegian Tax Administration expects to demand access to information from DNB (Norway's largest financial services group) about approximately 30 companies formed by DNB that are owned by Norwegians, 20 of whom are living in Norway.[157] 200 Norwegians are on the client list of Mossack Fonseca.[158]
Russia
The Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of the newspapers participating in the project that made the papers public, described the connections of various individuals listed in them to Russian president Vladimir Putin. They quoted Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman and US State Department documents saying that Russia is a "kleptocracy" and a "mafia state" respectively.[159] The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported about $2 billion had moved through a network of companies associated with Russian firms and individuals in "just a few years" and the companies appeared to have been used for "questionable business transactions."[159]
Putin has criticized offshore companies as "unpatriotic" on several occasions since 2011[159] and in 2013 law was passed banning foreign bank account for government officials.[160]
Putin's name does not appear in any of the records released to date, but those of his associates do. Construction billionaires Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, musician Sergei Roldugin and business magnate Alisher Usmanov are mentioned in the leaked documents,[161] as are Putin's long-standing friend, billionaire Gennady Timchenko,[161] as well as his press secretary's spouse, his cousin, and former KGB colleagues,[162] as well as several oligarchs connected to Mossack Fonseca shell companies.[159]
Sergei Roldugin a cellist with the St Petersburg orchestra, who is the godfather of Putin's eldest daughter and who has been described as Putin's "best friend" appears prominently in the Panama Papers. According to the leaked papers, Roldugin acquired assets worth at least $100 million, including a 12.5% stake in Video International (Russia's largest television advertising firm),[161] companies that own stock options for some of Russia's biggest companies and the rights to loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars.[163] In 2008, a company controlled by Roldugin joined with several other offshore companies to help 'another Putin insider' acquire control of Kamaz, Russia’s largest truck manufacturer, and obtain investment from German carmaker Daimler AG, $250 million for 10% of Kamaz.[163] Sandalwood, another company in which Roldugin and other insiders have an interest was issued lines of credit between 2009 and 2012 worth $800,000 by Russian Commercial Bank (RCB) in Cyprus, then a wholly owned subsidiary of VTB Bank, largely owned by the Russian state.[159] Panama Papers documents indicate that Roldugin companies received several loans with no collateral, or at very low interest rates, or never repaid.[159] In 2013, several shell companies linked to the brothers Boris and Arkady Rotenberg loaned worth about US$200 million to an company in Roldugin's network. The leaked documents do not show whether they were repaid. Shortly before the loan was granted, Arkady Rotenberg’s company had been awarded the tender for the South Stream pipeline project, worth billions.[159] Asked about his companies,[164] Rodulgin said "I have to take a look and find out what I can say and what I can't", and that financial matters are "delicate".[164]
Putin's spokesperson Dmitry Peskov called Western reporting of the Panama Papers "Putinophobia", said that they target Putin and are part of a conspiracy against Russia orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States Department of State and others.[165][166][167][168]
Putin denied "any element of corruption", and said his opponents are trying to destabilise Russia.[169] Putin also said: "WikiLeaks has showed us that official people and official organs of the US are behind this."[170] On 2016's annual Direct Line with Vladimir Putin, he called the leaked documents "reliable" but confined his comments to Roldugin, saying that Western media did not understand that the musician has spent all his off-shore income on "musical instruments for Russia". Putin also said Goldman Sachs of owned shares in the parent company of Süddeutsche Zeitung, which is in fact owned by a Munich family and a German media group.[171] The Kremlin apologized for this "mistake".[172]
Initially, mainstream Russian media almost entirely ignored the leak. Neither state-owned Channel 1 and Rossiya 1, nor privately owned REN-TV and NTV,, mentioned the story on April 4, the day the story broke.[173] The minimal coverage of the story ran in the middle of the night on Vesti TV and was in relation to Lionel Messi and Michel Platini.[174] An exception was the Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, described as "the ICIJ's Russian partner", which reported on the story both in hard copy and online.[175]
By end of April OCCRP published analysis of further batch of the leaked documents demonstrating a cash flow to the Rodulgin accounts from the 2007 tax theft of $230m by Moscow tax inspectors uncovered and reported by Sergei Magnitsky.[176]
Spain
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On April 15, 2016, José Manuel Soria was forced to leave his post as acting Minister of Industry, Energy and Tourism because the Panama Papers revealed that he and his family had maintained several offshore societies on tax havens during the previous decades.[177] Soria initially denied this, but reports kept leaking that contradicted him. On April 14, after it was revealed that he had owned a company on Jersey until 2002 during his term as Mayor of Las Palmas, he was put in a critical political position as a result of his confusing and changing explanations on the issue, resulting in his resignation the following day.[178] Spain's Soria became the second big casualty of the Panama Papers following Iceland's Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson.[179]
Art collectors Marina Ruiz-Picasso and Brojia Thyssen have Mossack Fonseca companies. Thyssen's lawyer said his company was fully declared to tax authorities and Ruiz-Picasso declined comment.[180] Other celebrities involved include Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, who won an Oscar in 2003 for Habla con ella and with his brother Agustin created a company in 1991 called Glen Valley in the British Virgin Islands. Agustin has responded saying he closed the company in 1994 and it paid all of its taxes.[181]
Sweden
The Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (FI) said on April 4, 2016 it would investigate into the actions of Nordea, one of the largest financial institutions in the Nordic countries, after the Panama Papers revealed the bank's Luxembourg office had helped to set up nearly 400 offshore companies for its clients between 2004 and 2014 in Panama and the British Virgin Islands for their customers.[182][183]
The Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (FI) has said that "serious deficiencies" exist in how Nordea monitors for money laundering, and had given the bank two warnings. In 2015 Nordea had to pay the largest possible fine—over five million EUR.[182] In 2012 Nordea asked Mossack Fonseca to change documents retroactively so that three Danish customers' power of attorney documents would appear to have been in force since 2010.[182] The director for Nordea Private Banking, Thorben Sanders, has admitted that before 2009 Nordea did not screen for tax evaders: "In the end of 2009 we decided that our bank shall not be a means of tax evasion," said Sanders.[182] Other Swedish banks are also present in the documents, but Nordea occurs 10,902 times and the next most frequently mentioned bank only occurs 764 times.[184]
The Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (FI) later said that they would also investigate the other three big banks in Sweden: Handelsbanken, Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken (SEB) and Swedbank. Other Swedish banks also appear in the documents, but Nordea occurs 10,902 times and the next most frequently mentioned bank only occurs 764 times.[185] In 2012 Nordea asked Mossack Fonseca to change documents retroactively so that three Danish customers' power of attorney documents would appear to have been in force since 2010.[182]
Nordea cut all ties with Mossack Fonseca following an interview with Nordea CEO Casper von Koskull on SVT on April 4.[183][186][187]
In response to the leaks, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven said he is very critical of Nordea's conduct and role, and Minister of Finance Magdalena Andersson characterized the bank's conduct as "totally unacceptable".[186][188][189]
Switzerland
Swiss authorities opened several procedures. On April 6, the federal police searched UEFA headquarters in Nyon as part of a "criminal mismanagement" probe into a Champions League television rights deal signed by FIFA's new president Gianni Infantino.[190] The same day, Geneva's attorney general opened several procedures in reaction to a report about misconduct by Swiss lawyers and trustees.[191]
On April 8, a few hours after the publication of a new series of articles focusing on art hidden behind offshore compainies, a prosecutor has sequestered a Modigliani worth some $25 million at Freeport Geneva.[180][192] Litigation in New York alleged the painting had been stolen by Nazis during World War II; the defendants said they did not own it, but the leaked documents show that they control International Art Center, a shell company registered in Panama which does own it.[180] Yves Bouvier and Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, in litigation over art pricing, both have Mossach Fonseca companies.[180] The leaked papers also shed light on the ownership of shell companies in protracted litigation in Lausanne over ownership of artwork from the Gstaad chalet of the late Greek shipping tycoon Basil Goulandris.[180][193]
On April 11, another investigation into the abuse of the name of charities like Red Cross or WWF was launched.[194]
Ukraine
When Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko took office in 2014, a popular uprising had just toppled his predecessor, the corrupt Viktor Yanukovych.[195] Poroshenko pledged to sell his candy business (Roshen) if elected, but leaked documents indicate that on August 21, 2014 he instead had Mossack Fonseca set up offshore holding company Prime Asset Partners Ltd in the British Virgin Islands and moved his company there, roughly two months after the election. The move had the potential to save him millions of dollars on his Ukrainian taxes.[196] Records in Cyprus show him as the firm's only shareholder.[197] Some legal experts say the explanation may be sound;[198] however this isn't making a difference to Ukrainian media making the point that Poroshenko opened his offshore account in August 2014 as Ukrainina soldiers were being massacred by the Russians in Ilovaisk.[199] The Panama Papers report may also have figured in the defeat of a trade deal with the Netherlands in a referendum there on April 6th.[199]
Anti-corruption group Transparency International believes that the "creation of businesses while serving as president is a direct violation of the constitution".[200] Also, journalists from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project believe that with the move Poroshenko committed two other illegalities, starting a new business while in office and failing afterwards to report it on his disclosure statements.[200] Poroshenko denied any wrongdoing and a spokesman said the offshore company had no active assets and was a legitimate corporate restructure aimed at helping to sell Poroshenko's Roshen group.[200] Analysts in Ukraine responded that the secretive way Poroshenko set up these accounts was certain to undermine trust in him, his party and Ukraine itself.[201]
The news about Poroshenko's offshore business came as his government campaigned against offshore companies.[196] Oleh Lyashko, leader of the Radical Party, urged lawmakers to begin impeachment proceedings,[196] And even some of his allies backed calls for a parliamentary commission to investigate the allegations.[196]
In the Ukrainian Parliament, relations between the Poroshenko bloc and the People's Front party of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk had over previous months already soured, with mutual accusations of corruption.[196] The Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk also announce to submit his resignation over Panama Papers leaks.[202]
United Kingdom
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According to The Guardian, "More than £170bn of UK property is now held overseas. ... Nearly one in 10 of the 31,000 tax haven companies that own British property are linked to Mossack Fonseca."[203][204] In September 2015, Private Eye created an online searchable map of properties in England and Wales owned by offshore companies, based in tax havens "from Panama to Luxembourg, and from Liechtenstein to the South Pacific island of Niue".[205]
Using this data the Eye published a series of exposés of the companies, arms dealers, oligarchs, money launderers and others who use offshore companies. Now Private Eye, using the same data, is also publishing a database of all properties acquired by offshore companies from 1999 to 2014, showing the address, the offshore corporate owners (some have more than one) and, where available, the price paid.[205]
Also included among the documents are the names of six members of the House of Lords, several of whom have been donors to Cameron's Conservative Party.[206][207]
As the United Kingdom still exercises varying degrees of control over British Overseas Territories and Crown dependencies which make up a large number of the many tax havens and 'secrecy jurisdictions' that exist, pressure has mounted on Prime Minister David Cameron to make changes.[208][209] According to the Wall Street Journal, the Panama Papers "are shining a light on the constellation of offshore centers in the last remnants of the British Empire, from Gibraltar to the British Virgin Islands."[208] Of the companies handled by Mossack Fonseca which were included in the leaked data, British Overseas Territory the BVI topped the list, with 113,000 of the nearly 215,000 companies that Mossack Fonseca managed incorporated there. British Overseas Territory Anguilla was 7th on the list.[210]
Cameron criticized complex offshore structures in 2012, saying that it is "not fair and not right", while at the G8 summit in 2013 he demanded more transparency, saying that it would be better for business.[207] In 2014, Cameron asked all Overseas Territories and Crown dependencies to set-up an open register of firms and individuals with investments registered in their jurisdictions, but by the time of the Panama Papers leak in April 2016, only Montserrat and Gibraltar had agreed to do so.[211]
Leader of the Opposition Jeremy Corbyn, said "The government needs to stop pussyfooting around on tax dodging"[212] and called for "direct rule" to be imposed over British Overseas Territories and Crown dependencies that act as tax havens,[213] a move former Business Secretary Vince Cable agreed with, although former attorney general Dominic Grieve described it as a "bit of a nuclear option"[214] which would "destroy the livelihoods" of BVI inhabitants in the finance industry.[215] The Labour Party also said that Cameron's plans for an "anti-corruption" summit in May[216] would be "a charade" if Cameron, as chairman of the summit, did not require representatives of all Crown dependencies and overseas territories to attend.[217]
Jennie Granger, a spokeswoman for HMRC said that the department had received "a great deal of information on offshore companies, including in Panama, from a wide range of sources, which is currently the subject of intensive investigation". She said HMRC had asked ICIJ to share all its data.[57][218] Private Eye and The Guardian revealed that Edward Troup, appointed executive chair of HMRC in April 2016, was a former partner with Simmons & Simmons, the London-based legal firm whose clients included the Panama-registered fund created by David Cameron's father, Blairmore Holdings.[219][220] Papers obtained by the Süddeutsche Zeitung and ICIJ reveal Simmons & Simmons' close relationship with running offshore companies and major overseas property owners, including an investment company run on behalf of Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al Thani, while Troup was its senior tax partner.[221]
Blairmore Holdings, Inc.
Ian Cameron, the late father of UK Prime Minister David Cameron, ran an offshore fund (Blairmore Holdings, Inc.) through Mossack Fonseca that avoided UK taxes for 30 years. His company moved to Ireland, as Blairmore's directors believed it would "come under more scrutiny" after David Cameron became Prime Minister.[222] On April 6, Cameron admitted that he owned shares in Blairmore, but sold his shares before becoming PM.[223]
Prominent politicians criticized the involvement of the Cameron family in the scandal. Jeremy Corbyn urged an immediate independent investigation into the tax affairs of Cameron's family as well as tighter laws on UK tax avoidance,[224] as did Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, Norman Baker and Nicola Sturgeon.[225]
Opponents called for Cameron's resignation after he admitted owning shares in Blairmore.[226] Ken Livingstone said that "[David Cameron] shouldn't just resign, he should be sent to prison";[227] however, others such as Alex Salmond said that "I'm not calling for his resignation until I get answers" to Cameron not registering offshore investment funds while an MP, accusing Cameron of "misleading the public".[228]
Nigel Farage however has said that most legal tax avoidance was "okay" after he was questioned on why £45,000 of his income was paid into his private company rather than a personal bank account.[229] Farage also criticized David Cameron for being hypocritical in his attitude towards the issue, citing past comments made about Jimmy Carr's tax avoidance.[230]
Asia
Armenia
The Panama Papers show Major-General of Justice and head of Armenia's Compulsory Enforcement Service hy was connected to three Panama-registered companies: Sigtem Real Estates Inc., Hopkinten Trading Inc., and Bangio Invest S.A., which issued bearer shares only. Poghosyan, who has a degree in economics, was the sole owner of Sigtem and Hopkinten,[231][232] which together owned Best Realty Ltd.[231]
Poghosian resigned April 18, saying that it was unacceptable that he had caused Armenia's name to be mentioned alongside that of Azerbaijan, whose president Ilham Aliyev "actually embezzled billions of dollars."[233]
On April 8, Armenian Transparency International Anti-Corruption Center filed a petition with the Ethics Committee for High Level Officials, requesting an investigation of Poghosyan.[234] Members of the families of Poghosyan's uncles Grigor and Mikhail Haroutyunyan were also mentioned in connection with his business.[231]
Varuzhan Hotkanian, head of the Armenian branch of the anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International, said that perhaps Poghosian was forced to resign by the country’s leadership, since the evidence pointed directly to him. But, he said, he still questions the government’s commitment to fighting corruption.[235] Leading opposition figure Levon Zourabian demanded answers on the matter from the floor of Parliament.[236]
Azerbaijan
Leaked documents show that the Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev's daughters Leyla and Arzu Aliyeva both hold shares in Exaltation Limited, incorporated in April 2015 for "holding UK property". Child & Child, a London law firm that registered it and obtained nominee directors for it though the Jersey branch of Mossack, claimed in doing so that the women had no political connections.[237] [238]
An investigation by Radio Free Europe and and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) previously discovered in 2012 that the daughters, through overseas holding companies, owned an interest in a gold mine operations awarded to them by fiat and detailed the procedural and environmental objections being railroaded.
According to ICIJ website, "The family of Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev leads a charmed, glamorous life, thanks in part to financial interests in almost every sector of the economy. ... [Aliyev's daughter] Arzu, has financial stakes in a firm that won rights to mine for gold in the western village of Chovdar and Azerfon, the country's largest mobile phone business. Arzu is also a significant shareholder in SW Holding, which controls nearly every operation related to Azerbaijan Airlines ("Azal"), from meals to airport taxis. Both sisters and brother Heydar own property in Dubai valued at roughly $75 million in 2010; Heydar is the legal owner of nine luxury mansions in Dubai purchased for some $44 million".[238]
Bangladesh
On April 7, 2016, the Anti Corruption Commission Bangladesh launched an inquiry to obtain details of the businesses and individuals allegedly affiliated with Moassack Fonseca.[239] Allegations have been made of thirty-two Bangladeshi individuals and two corporations, however, media outlets staking this claim have referenced an old ICIJ database of information compiled during the investigation of the 2013 Offshore Leaks.[240]
China
Relatives of highly placed Chinese officials including seven current and former senior leaders of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China have been named, including former Premier Li Peng's daughter Li Xiaolin, former Communist Party general secretary Hu Yaobang's son Hu Dehua and Deng Jiagui, the brother-in-law of current general secretary Xi Jinping. Deng had two shell companies in the British Virgin Islands while Xi was a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, but they were dormant by the time Xi became General Secretary of the Communist Party (paramount leader) in November 2012. Others named include the son and daughter-in-law of propaganda chief Liu Yunshan and the son-in-law of Vice-Premier Zhang Gaoli.[241]
Official Chinese statistics show investment in British Overseas Territories acting as tax havens being much more significant than in other places: $44 billion invested in the Cayman Islands and $49 billion in the British Virgin Islands. Despite these figures "probably exclud[ing] the private investments of the many family members of the ruling elite who have channelled money through the BVI", both figures exceed Chinese investment in the United States and United Kingdom.[242]
China's government is suppressing mention of the Panama Papers on social media and in search engines results,[243] and reportedly told news organizations to delete all content related to the Panama Papers leak. Chinese authorities consider the material a concerted foreign media attack on China, and ordered internet information offices to delete reports reprinted from the Panama Papers, and with no exceptions not to follow up on related content. Hong Lei, spokesman for China's foreign ministry, responded that he had "no comment" for "such groundless accusations" at an April 5 news conference.[244]
A screenshot showed that authorities had forced all websites to delete content about the Panama Papers.[245] Foreign websites such as WikiLeaks and China Digital Times are blocked from mainland China. On Sina Weibo, a twitter-like social media website, censors deleted content about the Panama Paper. However, the name of Xi's brother-in-law got through, and Weibo users tried to circumvent them with less obvious language such as "brother-in-law", "Canal Papers" (for the Panama Canal), and so on.[246] Despite the censorship, Weibo search ranking was topped by phrases seemingly related to the Panama Papers, such as "tax evasion", "document", "leak" and "Putin".[247]
Chinese entertainment magnate and art collector Wang Zhongjun also appears in the documents and did not respond to a request for comment.[180]
According to tax haven watchdog The Tax Justice Network, Chinese investors sometimes use overseas companies to take advantage of incentives China offers to foreign investors.[14]
Canadian broadcaster Radio Canada has reported that Hong Kong-based CITIC Pacific had Mossack Fonseca set up or manage more than 90 subsidiaries, and that the Chinese government was a majority stakeholder, according to fiscal expert Marwah Rizqy, professor of tax law at the Université de Sherbrooke.[248]
Hong Kong
Mossack Fonseca's Hong Kong office was its busiest, says the ICIJ, as Chinese officials and other wealthy figures would carry funds across the border and deposit them there to be channeled to offshore entities.[14] Hong Kong invested HK$4.6 trillion (£360 billion) into the BVI – more than Hong Kong invested in mainland China – and received HK$4.1 trillion (over £300 billion) from the BVI. A further £20 billion or so was placed into the Cayman Islands and Bermuda individually.[242]
Newspaper Ming Pao fired deputy editor Keung Kwok-yuen following a front-page article on the Panama Papers which mentioned many prominent Hong Kong citizens. The paper blamed a "difficult business environment," but had previously fired another editor in 2014 over another leak of offshore documents.[249]
Polytechnic University has two offshore companies set up by Mossack Fonseca in 2012 and 2013. One was created by vice-president Nicholas Yang Wei-hsiung, who became IT minister of Hong Kong.[250]
India
Bollywood celebrities Amitabh Bachchan and his daughter-in-law Aishwarya Rai Bachchan are listed in the papers. Bachchan has denied any connection to overseas companies, and a spokesman for Rai also questioned the documents' authenticity.[251] Bachchan repeated the denial in response to an August 21 report that he was listed as a director of two companies and participated in board meetings.[252]
Also listed are real estate developer and DLF CEO Kushal Pal Singh, Sameer Gehlaut of the Indiabulls group, and Gautam Adani's elder brother Vinod Adani.[253][254] Shares of both companies fell following the release of the papers, as well as those of Apollo Tyres, which had also been mentioned.[255] DLF said it had invested in existing overseas companies in compliance with the LRS Scheme set up in 2004 and reported this to the Indian tax agency.[256] An Apollo spokesman said that the family members of Chairman Onkar Kanwar who had been reported as owning offshore companies did not live in India and had complied with the law where they resided.[256] Gehlaut said he had paid full taxes and made full disclosures.[256]
Indian politicians on the list include Shishir Bajoria from West Bengal and Anurag Kejriwal, former chief of the Delhi Lok Satta Party.[253] Bajoria said he owned two other Isle of Man companies but not the one ascribed to him in the leaked documents. Corporate services provider First Names Group acknowledged erroneously providing his information to Mossack Fonseca.[257] MF records show Kejriwal as director of three offshore companies based in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), and holding two private foundations in Panama and power of attorney of another BVI company. He acknowledged having had offshore companies but said he shut them down after a short period of time.[258]
The name of deceased drug kingpin Iqbal Mirchi has also surfaced in the papers. Some 500 Indian citizens appear to be mentioned.[259]
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi ordered an inquiry, and subsequently the Indian government announced that it was constituting a special multi-agency group comprising officers from the investigative unit of the Central Board of Direct Taxes and its Foreign Tax and Tax Research Division, the Financial Intelligence Unit and the Reserve Bank of India.[260]
Israel
Some 600 Israeli companies and 850 Israeli shareholders are listed. Among the Israeli names found in the leaked documents are top attorney Dov Weissglass, who was the bureau chief of deceased prime minister Ariel Sharon; Jacob Engel, a businessman active in the African mining industry; and Idan Ofer, a member of one of Israel's wealthiest families, according to Haaretz.[261]
Weissglass' name appears as a sole owner of one of four companies set up by his business partner Assaf Halkin. The company, Talaville Global, was registered in the British Virgin Islands in May 2012, according to Haaretz, and seven months later, all of its shares were mortgaged against a loan from a Vienna bank.
Weissglass and Halkin told Haaretz that the company "was registered for the purpose of receiving a loan from the bank in order to invest in European properties. The bank would only allow a loan to a corporation... [the] company activity is reported to the tax authorities in Israel. The required tax on the said activity is paid in Israel."[262]
Many leaked documents reference Bank Leumi, primarily its branch on the island tax haven of Jersey. One of its customers, billionaire Teddy Sagi, made his fortune developing online gambling technology in England and recently developed the Camden Market commercial real estate space. Sagi is sole shareholder of at least 16 Mossack Fonseca offshore companies, mostly real estate ventures[263]
Israeli businessman Beny Steinmetz was also a Mossack Fonseca customer, with 282 companies.
Pakistan
Sharif family
The Mossack Fonseca documents do not name either prime Minister Nawaz Sharif or his younger brother, Punjab chief minister Shebaz Sharif. They do however link in-laws of Shebaz Sharif and children of Nawaz Sharif to offshore companies.[264][265] Mossack Fonseca records tie Nawaz daughter Maryam Nawaz and her brothers Hussein and Hassan to four offshore companies, Nescoll Limited, Nielson Holdings Limited, Coomber Group Inc., and Hangon Property Holdings Limited. The companies acquired luxury real estate in London during 2006–2007. The real estate was as collateral for loans of up to $13.8 million according to the Panama Papers.[266] The prime minister's children say the money came from the sale of a family business in Saudi Arabia.[266]
Maryam Nawaz tweeted denial of wrongdoing, adding that she did not own "any company/property abroad," except as "a trustee" in a brother's corporation, "which only entitles me to distribute assets to my brother Hussain's family/children if needed."[267] The leaked documents name her the sole beneficial owner of Nescoll, created in 1993, and Nielson, first registered in 1994. The two companies subscribed to Mossack Fonseca services in July 2006. The Panama Papers name Maryam as the joint owner with her brother Hussain of Coomber Group. Mossack Fonseca was managing Nescoll, Nielsen Holdings, and Coomber Group when the three companies obtained a £7 million mortgage from the Swiss bank, Deutsche Bank (Suisse) SA and purchased four flats in Avenfield House, at 118 Park Lane in London. Hassan, the other brother, bought Hangon Holdings and its stock in 2007 for £5.5 million; Hangon then bought property, financed through the Bank of Scotland, at 1 Hyde Park Place in London. .
Samina Durrani, mother of Shebaz Sharif's second wife, and Ilyas Mehraj, brother of his first, also figure in the documents. Habib Waqas Group/Ilyas Mehraj is listed as a shareholder with 127,735 shares in Haylandale Limited, registered July 24, 2003 in the Bahamas. Mehraj has denied knowing anything about "any company whether incorporated in the Commonwealth of Bahamas or anywhere else under the name: Haylandale Ltd."[264] Rainbow Limited, the newest of the three offshore companies owned by Samina Durrani, was registered September 29, 2016 in the British Virgin Islands (BVI).[264] Armani River Limited, registered in the Bahamas on May 16, 2002, describes its assets as "property in London, which is not currently rented."[264] Assets of Star Precision Limited, registered in BVI May 21, 1997 were reported as "cash as the investment portfolio. We are also holding 1,165,238 shares in Orix Leasing Pakistan Limited."[264]
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chairman Imran Khan called for an investigation of Sharif family finances and asked how well public figures who send their own money overseas could promote investment in Pakistan.[268] Hussain Nawaz said his family won't hamper any investigation, and urged one of former president Pervez Musharraf as well.[269] The government on April 15 announced an investigation by an Inquiry commission of all Pakistanis named in the documents. Opposition politicians said a judge, not a retired judge, should investigate. This issue is still under discussion and things are getting worse as various judges have already apologized from becoming a part of any such commission. In addition to this, the statement that came on 19 April 2016 from the Army Chief General Raheel Sharif stressing on the need of across the board accountability is also received as a warning from all the major shareholders [270]
Benazir Bhutto
The late Benazir Bhutto was also a Mossack Fonseca client. In 2001 the firm set up BVI company Petroline International Inc.for Bhutto, her nephew Hassan Ali Jaffery Bhutto, and her aide and head of security Rehman Malik, who later became a Senator and Interior Minister in the government of Yousaf Raza Gillani. Mossack Fonseca had deemed Bhutto's first company, the similarly named Petrofine FZC, politically sensitive and "declined to accept Mrs Bhutto as a client."[271] A United Nations committee chaired by former US Federal Reserve head Paul Volker had determined in a 2005 investigation into abuses of the oil-for-food program that Petrofine FZC paid US$2 million to the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein to obtain US $115–145 million in oil contracts.[272]
In 2006, the Pakistani National Accountability Bureau (NAB) accused Bhutto, Malik and Ali Jaffery of owning Petrofine, established since 2000 in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Bhutto and the Pakistan Peoples Party denied it. In April 2006 an NAB court froze assets owned in Pakistan and elsewhere by Bhutto and her husband Asif Ali Zardari, saying that the assets, totalling $1.5 billion, were the result of corrupt practices, and that Swiss charges of criminal money laundering filed in 1997 were still in litigation.[273]
Palestine
Tareq Abbas, a son of Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, was revealed to hold $1 million in shares of an Arab Palestinian Investment Company (APIC), an offshore company associated with the Palestinian Authority and partially owned by the Authority's Palestine Investment Fund.[274]
Mossack Fonseca, required by international banking standards to avoid money-laundering or fraudster clients, is supposed to be particularly alert for signs of corruption with politically exposed persons (PEP), in other words clients who either are or have close ties to government officials, but somehow failed to turn up any red flags concerning Tareq Abbas even though he shared a family name with the president of Palestine, and sat on the Board of Directors of a company with four fellow directors the firm did deem PEP because of their ties to Palestinian politics, and they actually did and documented due diligence research including a Google search.[274]
Qatar
Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, prime minister from 2007 to 2013, in 2002 acquired three shell companies incorporated in the Bahamas and another in the British Virgin Islands and through them moorage in Mallorca and a $300 million yacht named Al Mirqab.[275] The Panama Papers indicate he owns or owned eight shell companies. Subsequent reporting by Forbes found that Al Thani bought $700 million in Deutsche Bank shares in 2014 through Paramount Services Holdings and in 2015 transferred roughly half the stock to Supreme Universal Holdings, owned by a relative who had left office as emir of Qatar, also in 2013.[275]
Saudi Arabia
King Salman is mentioned in the leaks in relation to two companies based in the British Virgin Islands—Verse Development Corporation, incorporated in 1999, and Inrow Corporation, incorporated in 2002. The companies took out mortgages totalling over US$34 million and purchased properties in central London.[276] His role in the companies was not been specified. BVI company Crassus Limited, incorporated in 2004, registered a yacht in London, named Erga after King Salman's palace in Riyadh. The vessel boasts a banquet hall and can comfortably sleep 30.[195] King Salman is described in the documents as its "principal user".[277]
Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef is also named in the papers.[278]
Singapore
The Ministry of Finance and Monetary Authority of Singapore said in a statement that "Singapore takes a serious view on tax evasion and will not tolerate its business and financial centre being used to facilitate tax related crimes. If there is evidence of wrongdoing by any individual or entity in Singapore, we will not hesitate to take firm action."[279]
Syria
Three Syrian companies close to the government of Bashar Al-Assad – Maxima Middle East Trading, Morgan Additives Manufacturing and Pangates International – used Mossack Fonseca to create shell companies in the Seychelles to avoid the increasing pressure of global sanctions on the regime; this included these firms paying for helicopter fuel for the Syrian Air Force through shell companies.[280]
Rami and Hafez Makhlouf, the maternal cousins of Assad, were worth an estimated $5 billion before the Syrian Civil War, and had control of 60% of the economy. They had been subject to sanctions by the United States and the European Union since 2008, and suspected of controlling key gateways to Syria's oil and telecommunications business.[280] The US Treasury charged that Pangates supplied the Assad government with a thousand tonnes of aviation fuel.[281] However, the Makhloufs were able to continue to operate via a firm in Panama.[282] The Makhlouf's businesses included duty free, retail, banking and Syria's largest mobile phone network, Syriatel. Its companies were registered in the British Virgin Islands, and so not subject to US sanctions – however, on 9 May 2011, the EU issued its own sanctions against Rami and Hafez Makhlouf, and these were extended by an order in council to the BVI in July 2011.[283] Records show that it took Mossack Fonseca until 6 September to decide to resign from Makhlouf's companies. By then, Makhlouf had cut ties with his bank. HSBC told the law firm that the Swiss authorities had frozen Makhlouf's accounts, and that "they have had no contact with the beneficial owner of this company since the last 3 months".[283]
Frederik Obermaier, co-author of the Panama Papers story and an investigative reporter at the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, told Democracy Now: "[Mossack Fonseca] realised that [Makhlouf] was the cousin, and they realised that he was sanctioned, and they realised that he's allegedly one of the financiers of the Syrian regime. And they said, 'Oh, there is this bank who still does business with him, so we should still keep with him, as well'."[284]
HSBC also appeared to reassure Mossack Fonseca not only that it was "comfortable" with Makhlouf as a client but suggested there could be a rapprochement with the family of Assad by the US. Makhlouf has already been revealed to be a long-standing client of HSBC's Swiss private bank, holding at least $15 million with it in multiple accounts in 2006.[282] The Panamanian files also show HSBC provided financial services to a Makhlouf company called Drex Technologies, which HSBC said was a company of "good standing".[282]
Thailand
The Bangkok Post said that the "...Anti-Money Laundering Office (AMLO) is seeking information from its foreign counterparts regarding twenty-one Thai nationals reportedly included in a list of people worldwide using a Panama-based law firm apparently specializing in money laundering and tax evasion. It is not clear why AMLO is investigating only twenty-one. The Panama Papers include at least 780 names of individuals based in Thailand and another fifty companies based in Thailand. Some are foreigners or foreign-owned companies, but 634 individual addresses in Thailand appear in the documents that have surfaced to date, including the CEOs of giant companies Bangkok Land and Phatra Finance.[285]
United Arab Emirates
ICIJ, The Guardian and The Independent have reported that UAE President Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan owns London real estate worth more than £1.2 billion through a structure of some thirty shell companies Mossack Fonseca set up for him in the British Virgin Islands and administer for him, using them to manage and control the luxury properties in London.[204][286][287] By December 2015, Mossack Fonseca held nearly all of the shares in those companies in trust structures on his behalf, with the President and his wife, son and daughter the trust beneficiaries.[287]
North America
Canada
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has denied any involvement in the affair, saying he had "entirely and completely been transparent about mine and my family's finances. That is something I learned early on that Canadians expect from their leaders."[288] Canada Revenue Agency said in a statement that its current tax evasion audits include "some Canadian clients associated with law firm Mossack Fonseca,"[289] and added that it would communicate "with its treaty partners to obtain any further information that may not currently be in its possession." The CRA has tax treaties with 92 different countries and 22 Tax Information Exchange Agreements.[288][289]
The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) denied any wrongdoing associated with the 370+ clients it had referred to Mossack Fonseca over the years."We have an extensive due diligence process... RBC works within the legal and regulatory framework of every country in which we operate," said a bank spokesman.[290] CEO David McKay said the bank will review the four decades of documentation for any problems.[291][292] CEO Bill Downe of the Bank of Montreal said "Canadian banks have 'dramatically' beefed up anti-money laundering control over the last seven to 10 years,"[293] and added that any link between Canadian businesses and the Panama Papers companies would have originated a long time ago, before Canadian banks took action to stop money laundering.[291]
Mexico
Aristóteles Núñez, who is in charge of the government's tax administration, Servicio de Administración Tributaria, said that people involved in the Panama Papers case can still make tax declarations and pay taxes on their investments. Being Mexican and having foreign investments or bank accounts is not a crime, but having income and not declaring it is illegal. If the concealment of income from Panama Papers-related investments is categorized as tax evasion, fines of up to 100% of the omitted tax payment can result, as well as three months to nine years imprisonment.[295]
- Mexican actress Edith González is linked through her husband Lorenzo Lazo Margáin.[296]
- Ricardo Salinas Pliego, president of Grupo Salinas, which includes Azteca, Banco Azteca and Azteca Foundation among others, used an offshore company set up in the Virgin Islands to purchase a yacht, Azteca II, under a Cayman Island flag.[11] Felicitas Holdings Limited, registered in the British Virgin Islands, spent £261 million in 2014 on artworks by Francisco de Goya and also bought works by Mexican painter Manuel Serrano; the press director of Grupo Salinas to Forbes that all of Pliego's transactions complied with the law.[11]
- Juan Armando Hinojosa Cantú, a close friend of Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto, enlisted Mossack Fonseca to create trusts for accounts worth US$100 million after he was investigated for allegedly giving special favours to the Mexican president and his wife, according to an analysis by ICIJ, who said that the documents showed "a complex offshore network" of nine companies in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.[136] Described as Peña Nieto's "favorite contractor", Hinojosa's companies have won more than eighty government contracts and received at least US$2.8 billion in state money, The New York Times reported last year.[297]
According to Forbes, "Hinojosa and other prominent Mexicans, mostly businessmen with close ties to the government, including at least one member of the Forbes billionaires list, were the subject of extensive articles published on line by Proceso and Aristegui Noticias Sunday to coincide with the ICIJ posting of the Panama Papers."[298]
United States
Background
The US "is effectively the biggest tax haven in the world"
President Barack Obama was critical of Caribbean tax havens in his 2008 election campaign, calling Ugland House "either the biggest building in the world or the biggest tax scam on record."[300] Ugland house, in George Town on the Cayman Islands, is the registered office for 18,857 entities, over 12,000 of them US-based. This includes many major investment funds, international joint ventures and capital market issuers.
Regulatory Environment
- In 2010, the United States implemented the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act; the law required financial firms around the world to report accounts held by US citizens to the Internal Revenue Service.
- The US on the other hand refused the Common Reporting Standard set up by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, alongside Vanuatu and Bahrain.[301] This means the US receives tax and asset information for American assets and income abroad, but does not share information about what happens in the United States with other countries, in other words has become attractive as a tax haven.
The Tax Justice Network ranks the US third in terms of the secrecy and scale of its offshore industry, behind Switzerland and Hong Kong but ahead of the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg.[301] The United States has been popular as a destination for offshore funds for Chinese investors, said Canadian financial crimes expert Bill Majcher, because investors think it will resist pressure from China.[14] Andrew Penney from Rothschild & Co described the US as "effectively the biggest tax haven in the world",[299]
A 2012 study by various US universities showed that the US has the most lenient regulations for setting up a shell company anywhere in the world outside of Kenya.[302] Tax havens such as the Cayman Islands, Jersey and the Bahamas were far less permissive, researchers found, than states such as Nevada, Delaware, Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming and New York.[301][302] "[Americans] discovered that they really don’t need to go to Panama," said James Henry of the Tax Justice Network.[301] Lawyers, trust companies and financial firms including Rothschild & Co are moving offshore accounts from locations such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands into the US to take advantage of the country's loose regulations, even calling it the "new Switzerland".[299]
Mark Hays of Global Witness said "the US is one of the easiest places to set up so-called anonymous shell companies".[301] More than 1.1 million live legal entities were incorporated in Delaware at the end of 2014. An increasing number – more than 70% – of those were LLCs.[303] The Delaware Division of Corporations said in August 2015 that
- "...an LLC entices all types of people since it is easy to operate and oversee..."
Delaware is currently one of the few states without sales tax.[304] Delaware does not tax companies which operate there, nor their royalty income. However, the LLC is more popular and often less expensive in states such as Wyoming, Nevada and Oregon. Approximately 668,000 anonymous LLCs are registered just in those three states.[303]
Real Estate and Money Laundering
Many Mossack Fonseca offshore shell companies have been used to buy luxury real estate anonymously. The US Treasury began requiring title companies to report the identities for purchasers of real estate paying in cash or through a limited liability company (LLC) of properties exceeding $3 million in Manhattan and $1 million in Miami; both cities where this money laundering technique seems to be increasing in prevalence.[305] Nearly half of US residential property purchases of over $5 million in the last few years were carried out by anonymous shell companies.[301][306]
Americans
McClatchy Newspapers, the only participating US news organization in the investigation, found four Americans with offshore shell companies named in the documents. All had previously been either accused or convicted of financial crimes such as fraud or tax evasion.[83] Three reasons have been suggested to explain the paucity of Americans in the leak:[307]
- Shell companies can be created in the United States,
- major international banks based in America tend to have offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands instead
- US laws like the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and the Tax Information Exchange Agreements (TIEAs) of 2010 have meant that the "tax evasion game [was] principally over for American taxpayers."
Asked about the paucity of American individuals in the documents, digital editor of Süddeutsche Zeitung, Stefan Plöchinger, said via Twitter: "Just wait for what is coming next."[308] Plöchinger later clarified that he was just advocating not jumping to conclusions.[309]
New York's Department of Financial Services has asked 13 foreign banks, including Deutsche Bank AG, Credit Suisse Group AG, Commerzbank AG, ABN Amro Group NV and Societe Generale SA, for information about their dealings with Mossack Fonseca. The banks are not accused of wrongdoing but must provide telephone logs and records of other transactions between their New York branches and the law firm.[310]
Copies of at least 200 American passports – indicating that their owners applied for banking services – have been discovered in the Papers, but no US politicians have yet been named in the leak.[63][83][311]
The names of a few Americans are however mentioned:
Puerto Rican recording artist Ramón Luis Ayala, better known as Daddy Yankee, appears in the leaked documents.[312]
CEO and then Chairman of Citibank (1198-2006) Sanford Weill appears in the documents as sole shareholder of April Fool, a company based in the British Virgin Islands that managed a yacht of the same name 2001-2005. Weill's second company, Brightao, includes Chinese and American investors and holds share in a Chinese insurance and risk-management firm, Mingya Insurance Brokers.
Jerry Slusser, a fundraiser for Republican Mitt Romney, initially said he did not recall opening an offshore company, but then called his accountant and said it was for an investment in Hong Kong that eventually showed a loss. He declined to provide further detail.[313]
Panama Free Trade Agreement
The Panama Free Trade Agreement, supported by Obama and Clinton, has been accused of enabling the practices detailed within the Panama Papers through lax regulatory oversight.[314] However, an Obama administration official said the argument has "zero merit".[315] John Cassidy of The New Yorker says the Panama Free Trade Agreement actually forced Panama to release information to the American regulatory authorities on "the ownership of companies, partnerships, trusts, foundations, and other persons".[316]
Citing leaked diplomatic cables, Fortune writer Chris Matthews speculated that Obama and Clinton may have supported the agreement, after opposing it while campaigning for office, because it was a quid pro quo for Panamanian support of US efforts against drug trafficking. In any event, he notes, while it is true that the agreement abolished limits on fund transfers between the US and Panama, the Obama administration insisted that the two countries first sign a Tax Information and Exchange Agreement as well, which facilitated the exchange of tax information between the countries.[317]
After the leak
President Barack Obama addressed the overseas shell companies exposed by the leak in a press conference: "It's not that they're breaking the laws," he said, "it's that the laws are so poorly designed that they allow people, if they've got enough lawyers and enough accountants, to wiggle out of responsibilities that ordinary citizens are having to abide by."[318] Although no leader in the US was mentioned in the Panama Papers, Obama said that "Frankly, folks in America are taking advantage of the same stuff".[319]
Representatives Carolyn Maloney (D, NY) and Peter King (R, NY) and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D, RI) have introduced a bill to require all shell companies registered in the US to report their real owner, or beneficial owner. However, the bill has faced resistance from the National Association of Secretaries of State, who are concerned about loss of tax revenue and the burden of regulation.[301]
Jürgen Mossack testified under oath that M.F. Corporate Services (Nevada) Ltd. had no affiliation with the Panamanian Mossack Fonseca, but the Panama Papers show that it was in fact a wholly owned subsidiary and tried to hide the relationship, ordering emails and other computer footprints deleted.[320][321] The firm was fighting an order that it turn over the details of 123 shell companies created by an associate of a former President of Argentina.[320][322]
Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara has opened a criminal investigation on matters related to the Panama Papers and sent a letter April 3 to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) saying his office "would greatly appreciate the opportunity to speak as soon as possible."[323] The ICIJ received many such requests from many countries and ICIJ Director Gerard Ryle has said its policy is not to turn over any materials.[324]
Hillary Clinton and the Panama Papers
Former Secretary of State and Democratic Presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton condemned "outrageous tax havens and loopholes...in Panama and elsewhere".[325][326] at a Pennsylvania AFL–CIO event. Clinton added that "some of this behavior is clearly against the law, and everyone who violates the law anywhere should be held accountable", but it was "scandalous how much is actually legal".[325] Clinton promised that "We are going after all these scams and make sure everyone pays their fair share here in America."[325][326]
However, McClatchy Newspapers report that the Clinton Foundation and its affiliates have close ties to several individuals who have used Mossack Fonseca for offshore corporations, as well as donors to the political campaigns of Bill and Hillary Clinton.[327]
South America
Argentina
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Argentine president Mauricio Macri is listed as head of a trading company based in the Bahamas that he did not disclose during his tenure as Mayor of Buenos Aires; it is not clear whether disclosure of non-equity directorships was then required under Argentine law.[64]
On April 7, 2016, federal prosecutor Federico Delgado began a formal investigation into Macri's involvement with Fleg Trading Ltd., the company registered in Panama for which President Macri was listed as director. Judge Sebastián Casanello was asked to start the file on the inquiry.[328] The initial petition was made by Neuquén representative Darío Martínez. Martínez claims Macri could be guilty of perjury due to omissions made in his sworn statement.[329] Martínez also referenced another offshore company, Kagemusha SA (named after Akira Kurosawa's 1980 film), which had been established in 1981 and to which President Macri also had connections.[330][331]
The family of Argentine Barcelona football player Lionel Messi said they would file a complaint after reports said Mossack Fonesca set a company up for him in 2012 named Mega Star Enterprises Inc.[332] The family denied Messi had been involved and called the accusations slanderous. They said that the company referred to in the Panama Papers was inactive and that Messi had declared all income from image rights before and after proceedings with the Argentine Tax Agency.[333] Messi and his father Jorge will stand trial in May 2016 on three counts of tax fraud. Spanish prosecutors say he tried to evade €4.1m in taxes on income from his image rights by assigning them to front companies in Belize and Uruguay.[334][335]
Brazil
Five billionaires from Brazil, the sons of two Brazilian billionaires (including Brazil’s richest man, Jorge Paulo Lemann), and four former billionaire Brazilian families appear in the Panama Papers leak, according to Forbes. The Brazilian news website UOL has access to the leaked documents and has published an article and a list. Like many Panama Paper reports, their story cautions that some of the people mentioned in the documents may be doing nothing wrong; "In general there is nothing illegal per se in having an offshore company and in fact it is very common for an international business to set one up for transactions and joint ventures when they’re doing business all over the world," said Brazil-based Marcello Hallake, a Brazil-based partner of the law firm Jones Day.[336]
However, six out of ten members of Congress now face one criminal investigation or another.[337] High-profile construction executives and a senator are among the 84 people arrested in the Petrobras scandal,[337] a number that reflects the job protections in the 1988 Constitution for judges and prosecutors.[337]
Three men (Marcel Herrmann Telles, Carlos Alberto Sicupira and Jorge Felipe Lemann, son of their long-time business partner Jorge Paulo Lemann, Brazil’s richest man and a controlling shareholder of Anheuser-Busch InBev) set up three offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands and the Bahamas tied to private equity firm 3G and to beer firm Ambev, a unit of Anheuser-Busch Inbev, according to UOL. Two of the companies are no longer active and the men are no longer tied with the third. They told UOL the companies had been publicly disclosed and registered. Documents described Lemann as an advisor to Brazilian firm Sao Carlos. His father and father's business partners own a controlling stake.[336]
The Panama Papers reveal that a former Supreme Court judge, Barbosa,[338] bought an apartment in downtown Miami.[339]
Operation Car Wash
In January 2016, even before the Panama Papers were published, the Brazilian Federal Police, as part of a corruption investigation known as Operation Car Wash, had already accused Mossack Fonseca's law firm of helping suspects create offshore entities to hide corrupt money. They alleged that the firm used a real estate company to help hide criminal proceeds from the scheme involving Petrobras.[340]
Impeachment
The leak complicated an already volatile political situation in Brazil, where a tanking economy had led to calls for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff amid many revelations of political corruption. As impeachment proceedings began, it became clear that the next two people in the order of succession have been implicated in the Petrobras scandal. She herself is not; she was accused of manipulating the national budget to increase her chances of re-election.[341]
Politicians from seven different political parties in Brazil were named as clients of Mossack Fonseca. Leaked files mention politicians from Brazil's largest party, the PMDB, which broke away from President Dilma Rousseff's coalition in 2016. Political figures from the PSDB, the most prominent opposition party in the country, were also mentioned in the leaks, as well as others from the PDT, PP, PSB, PSD and the PTB parties. No politicians from Rousseff's party were mentioned in the leaks.[342]
FIFA bribes
A group of Dutch journalists from the daily newspaper Trouw, found evidence in the Panama Papers showing that TV Globo is cited "many times" in a money laundering investigation of the De Nederlandsche Bank which revealed that for years the media outlet conducted "irregular financial transactions" through tax havens in order to pay broadcast rights for the Copa Libertadores.[343]
Chile
The head of the Chilean branch of Transparency International, which campaigns against corporate secrecy, resigned when his name was linked to five firms in tax havens by the leaked documents.[344]
Colombia
The National Directorate of Taxes and Customs launched an investigation into all 850 clients of Mossack Fonseca Colombia, a subsidiary of Mossack Fonseca that was established in 2009.[345] In 2014, Colombia had placed Panama onto its blacklist of tax havens.[346] The leaked documents also led Panama to move forward with the ongoing negotiations with Colombia on tax information-sharing.[347]
Ecuador
Ecuadorian journalists have published the names of three current government officials, and the Panama Papers also reveal that in 2012 the Panamanian government believed that a Mossack Fonseca company the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor was investigating for embezzlement, Orlion S.A., had been sold to president Rafael Correa Delgado and his brother Fabricio Correa in 2006.[348] Mossack Fonseca had been asked for shareholder information but did not have it, and so contacted Legalsa & Asociados, a law firm in Guayaquil, Ecuador which had set up the offshore for a client.[348] Shortly afterwards the firm dropped the offshore due to lack of information.[348]
Correa's cousin, Pedro Delgado Campana, convicted in absentia in Ecuador for embezzlement, bought a home in North Miami Beach through a Mossack Fonesca company with his wife, who was Consul of Ecuador in Miami at the time.[349]
Venezuela
Josmel Velasquez, formerly a security official under the late Hugo Chavez, was arrested April 15 trying to catch a flight out of the country due to an offshore company revealed by the Panama Papers. His mother was also arrested, but allowed to return home due to her health.[350]
Africa
Former South African president Thabo Mbeki, head of the African Union's panel on illicit financial flows, on April 9 called the leak "most welcome" and called on African nations to investigate the citizens of their nations who appear in the papers. His panel's 2015 report[351] found that Africa loses $50 billion a year due to tax evasion and other illicit practices and its 50-year losses top a trillion dollars. Furthermore, he said, the Seychelles, an African nation, is the fourth most mention tax haven in the documents.[352]
Algeria
Minister of Industry and Mines Abdeslam Bouchouared has been sole owner of a Panamanian-registered offshore company known as Royal Arrival Corp since 2015. The company, active in Turkey, Great Britain and Algeria, is managed through Compagnie d'Etude et de Conseil (CEC), based in Luxembourg, and has an account in NBAD Private Bank SA, a Swiss bank. CEC confirmed ownership of Royal arrival and said it managed the minister's inherited assets with transparency[353]
Angola
Petroleum Minister José Maria Botelho de Vasconcelos had power of attorney for an offshore company in 2002, while petroleum minister, according to the leaked documents. He denies wrongdoing.[354]
Democratic Republic of Congo
In March 2005, Dan Gertler International formed a new company, Global Enterprises Corporate (GEC), with with Global Resources, owned by Beny Steinmetz. A former DRC mines minister, Simon Tuma-Waku, was "special adviser". The company formed a joint copper and cobalt mining venture with DRC agency La Générale Des Carriers et Des Mines (Gécamines), which held 25%, and GEC 75%, which they placed into an Isle of Man holding company, Nikanor Plc. The IPO raised £400 million in London and the company eventually reached a market capitalization of $1.5 billion for an initial investment of $3 million.[355]
Steinmetz appears in 282 leaked documents[356]; Gertler of Dan Gertler Inc, who had ties to Joseph Kabila and his closest aide, more than 200.[355] The presidential decree that ratified the agreement was issued despite the recommendation against it by the anti-corruption Lutundula Commission.[355]
In January 2010 Gécamines revoked a joint venture contract for the Kingamyambo Musonoi Tailings copper project with First Quantum Minerals, a Canadian company which had spent $750 million on a treatment plant at the site. A majority stake was then sold to Highwinds Group, which paid $60 million and turned out to be owned by Gertler, who sold Camrose, another offshore company that owned Highwinds, to a Kazakhstan entity for $689 million. A lawsuit, First Quantum vs Highwinds and Others, subsequently recovered more than a billion dollars.[355]
According to the Panama Papers, Kabila's twin sister owns part of an offshore company with interests in Congo that include a part of mobile-phone company Vodacom Congo. The government called a press conference to warn journalists against printing the names of any Congolese figures that might appear in the documents.[354]
Egypt
Alaa Mubarak, son of former president Hosni Mubarak, was cited as owning, through holding companies, real estate properties in London.[136] The assets of his Virgin Islands-registered firm Pan World Investments were frozen in response to a European Union order when his father stepped down in 2011 during the Arab Spring. Mossack Fonseca was fined $37,500 in 2013 for lack of due diligence. Alaa and his brother were convicted last year of embezzling state funds and still face trial for insider trading.[357]
Egyptian businessmen Mohamed Abu El-Enein, Ahmed Bahgat, Ashraf Marwan, Ibrahim Kamal, Mohamed Nosseir, Mohamed Mansour, Raouf Ghabbour, and Mohamed Al-Maghraby are all named in the leaked documents, as well as the Orascom Development Holding company, headed by Samih Sawiris, and also the Bank of Alexandria, Banque Misr, and Banque du Caire.[358]
Former Sudanese President Ahmed al-Mirghani was a client of Mossack Fonseca also.[359] Al-Mirghani lived in Egypt after the 1989 coup that ended his presidency and was active in the Democratic Unionist Party. [359] Orange Star Corporation bought a long-term lease in a tony London neighborhood near Hyde Park for $600,000 the same year al-Mirghani created it, and at the time of his death held assets worth $2.72 million.[359]
Ghana
John Addo Kufuor, son of John Agyekum Kufuor, had Mossack Fonseca manage his trust starting in 2001 when his father took office. The trust held $75,000 in a bank account in Panama; his mother was also a beneficiary. He was linked to two other offshore companies also registered during his father’s term. They are now inactive.[357][352]
Kenya
Deputy Chief Justice Kalpana Rawal was a director or shareholder in four holding companies and was active in two after she took office. Her husband owns another seven. The companies were used for real estate transactions in Britain. Rawal and her husband were shareholders and directors of Highworth Management Services, where Ajay Shah, a former director of Trust Bank, was also a shareholder and director. The Central Bank of Kenya ordered Shah's assets auctioned to repay depositors after Trust Bank collapsed, but he went into hiding and the assets have not been recovered.[360]
Morocco
Mounir Majidi, personal secretary of King Mohammed VI was designated in March 2006 as the representative of SMCD Limited created in 2005 through Geneva financial advisor Dextima Conseils. According to the ICIJ, through SMCD Majidi bought the "Aquarius W", a 1930s-era luxury sailboat, which was then registered in Morocco as "El Boughaz", belonging to the king. SMCD, according to the ICIJ, also made a loan to a Luxembourg company, Logimed Investissements Co SARL, for which details are not available. Following this loan, SMCD was liquidated in 2013.[361]
Nigeria
President of the Senate Bukola Saraki was found, through the Panama Papers leak, to have ties to at least four offshore companies he failed to declare to the Code of Conduct Bureau as Nigerian law requires.[362]
Aliko Dangote, chief executive of the Dangote Group, is tied in the leaked documents to four offshore companies, and as many as 13 counting family and business associates. Dangote, with an estimated $17 billion worth, is currently involved in the construction of a $14 billion oil refinery in Lagos.[363]
Former Delta State governor James Ibori is also mentioned in the leak.[363] Ibori pleaded quilty in London in 2012 to siphoning $75 million out of Nigeria while he was in office from 1999-2007.[63] All charges against him in Nigeria had been dropped in Nigeria following an election.[364] Ibori was sentenced to 13 years. Mossack Fonseca, the registered agent for his four offshore entities, received a request in 2008 for information about his accounts from British Crown Prosecutors. His family's Julex Foundation was the shareholder in Stanhope Investments, a company incorporated in 2003 on the island of Niue, to which he funneled millions of dollars so he could buy a private jet.[365]
The anticorruption initiative of the Olusegun Obasanjo government, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, questioned whether the Yar’Adua administration has refrained was loathe to pursue members of the Nigerian elite suspected of corruption, including leading financiers of the ruling party, or those like Ibori who supported had their election.
Efforts to recover government funds diverted at the hands of Sani Abacha, variously estimated between $5–11 billion. The World Bank told de in 2015 that it needed more time to produce a report on the subject.[366]
Rwanda
The government of Rwanda uses an offshore company to lease a private jet for its senior politicians.[354] Leaked documents show that Brigadier-General Emmanuel Ndahiro, using a London address, become a director of a British Virgin Islands company, Debden Investments Ltd. in 1998, owner of a jet aircraft. Ndahiro, a close advisor of president Paul Kagame was then spokesman Kagame’s military.[354]
Sierra Leone
The ICIJ investigation traces out many levels of offshore holdings in multiple countries related to the business dealings of Beny Steinmetz, with many serious findings such as a request that Mossack Fonseca backdate the revocation of a power of attorney.[356]
Steinmetz, who has a personal fortune of $6 billion, supplies diamonds to Tiffany and DeBeers and is Sierra Leone's largest private investor. Yet, according to a detailed report in The Namibian, his businesses owe, among other debts, property taxes of $700,000 to the city of Koidu.[356] According to data obtained by the African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), in some months from 2012 to 2015, one of his companies, Octea, exported more than US$330 million in rough diamonds.[356] Octea reports itself more than US$150 million in the red.[356]
South Africa
Two men linked to Fidentia, a South African asset management company that looted 1.2 billion rand[367] from pension funds meant to provide for 46,000 widows and orphans of mineworkers,[368] had accounts with Mossack Fonseca, which was willing to help hide the money even after South Africa made their names public.[368] The former chief executive of Fidentia, J. Arthur Brown, was sentenced in 2014 to concurrent 15-year sentences.[368] The FBI arrested one man, Steven Goodwin, in Los Angeles in 2008. Sent back to South Africa, Goodwin was sentenced to 10 years in prison for fraud and money laundering.[369] The other, Graham Maddock, was also later jailed in South Africa for fraud.
Khulubuse Zuma, nephew of South African President Jacob Zuma, has links in the documents to an offshore company with oil interests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He has denied any wrongdoing.[354]
Sudan
Former President Ahmed al-Mirghani surfaced as a client of Mossack Fonseca.[359] Al-Mirghani, who was president from 1986 to 1989, created Orange Star Corporation in the British Virgin Islands through the Panama firm in 1995, when he was living in Egypt after the coup that ended his presidency. He was active in the Democratic Unionist Party there. [359] Orange Star Corporation bought a long-term lease in a tony London neighborhood near Hyde Park for $600,000 the same year al-Mirghani created it, and at the time of his death held assets worth $2.72 million.[359]
Tunisia
The trial court prosecutor in Tunis ordered a judicial inquiry into the Panama Papers and Tunisian political figures suspected of hiring the firm. A judge from a Tunisian court specializing in financial crimes was assigned to the case.[370] The Tunisian Assembly of the Representatives of the People established a parliamentary commission of inquiry as well[371]
Newspaper Inkyfada had access to the documents and reported a dozen politicians, former government officials and lawyers had been implicated, as well as a leading media figure.
Monday 4 April 2016 it reported that the former secretary-general of the Nidaa Tounes political party, Mohsen Marzouk, had had an offshore account, and the coordinator of the new political party, fr, was on the point of creating his own account in December 2014, in the first presidential elections. Marzouk had written Mossack Fonseca about a company in the Virgin Islands, emphasizing a desire to hold funds and conduct business overseas.[203]
Zimbabwe
An arms dealer and a mining tycoon with close links to President Robert Mugabe operated offshore companies despite US and European sanctions against them until 2013, more than four years after the sanctions were announced, according the leaked documents.[354]
Oceania
Australia
Australia said April 22 that it will create a public register showing the beneficial, or actual, owners of shell companies, as part of an effort to stamp out tax avoidance by multinational corporations.[372]
The Australian Taxation Office has announced that it is investigating 800 individual Australian taxpayers on the Mossack Fonseca list of clients and that some of the cases may be referred to the country's Serious Financial Crime Task Force.[373] Eighty names match to an organized crime intelligence database.[374]
New Zealand
New Zealand's Inland Revenue Department said that they were working to obtain details of people who have tax residence in the country who may have been involved in arrangements facilitated by Mossack Fonseca.[375]
Gerard Ryle, director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, told Radio New Zealand on April 8, 2016 that New Zealand is a well-known tax haven and a "nice front for criminals".[376]
Niue
Mossack Fonseca approached Niue in 1996 and offered to help set up a tax haven on the tiny South Sea island. The law firm drafted the necessary legislation, permitting offshore companies to operate in total secrecy. They took care of all the paperwork, the island got a modest fee for each filing, and it seemed like quite a deal, even if they were required by law now to provide all banking paperwork in Russian and Chinese as well as English.[377]
Soon the filings almost covered the island's year budget. The US government however made official noises in 2001 about laundering criminal proceeds and Chase Bank blacklisted the island and Bank of New York followed suit. This caused inconvenience to the population so they let their contract with Mossack Fonseca expire and the privacy-seekers on the banking world moved on.[377]
FIFA investigation
On May 27, 2015, the US Department of Justice indicted a number of companies and individuals for conspiracy, corruption and racketeering in connection with bribes and kickbacks paid to obtain media and marketing rights for FIFA tournaments. Some immediately entered guilty pleas.[378]
Among those indicted were Jeffrey Webb and Jack Warner, the current and former presidents of CONCACAF, the continental confederation under FIFA headquartered in the United States. They were charged with racketeering and bribery offenses. Others were U.S. and South American sports marketing executives who paid and agreed to pay well over $150 million in bribes and kickbacks.[378]
On Dec. 12, 2014, José Hawilla, the owner and founder of the Traffic Group, the Brazilian sports marketing conglomerate, waived indictment and pleaded guilty to a four-count information charging him with racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Hawilla also agreed to forfeit over $151 million, $25 million of which was paid at the time of his plea.[378]
Torneos & Traffic (T&T) is a subsidiary of Fox International Channels since 2005[379] (with investments since 2002) and is the same company involved in corrupt practices in the acquisition of rights to major South American soccer tournaments.[380][381]
Notes
- ^ MOVIN: an independent political movement based in Panama, focused on influencing and monitoring the independence, efficiency and transparency of government institutions and their management. See "Civil Society | Policy Areas | ERCAS – European Research Centre for Anti-Corruption and State-Building". www.againstcorruption.eu.
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This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
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External links
- Panama Papers Portal of International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (USA)
- Panama Papers Portal of Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany)
- Panama Papers Portal of The Guardian (United Kingdom)
- Panama Papers Portal of Financial Times (United Kingdom)
- Panama Papers Portal of Le Monde (France)
- Portal of the African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR) (Africa)
- Panama Papers Portal of Inkyfada (Tunisia)
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- Panama Papers
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