New Leak Reveals Chaotic Aftermath Of Panama Papers
Will Fitzgibbon · June 20, 2018
The latest leak of internal documents reveals the panic that marked the beginning of the end for Mossack Fonseca.
New Leak Reveals Chaotic Aftermath Of Panama Papers
*Search the Panama Papers
https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/pages/data
Panama Papers firm did not know who 75% of its clients were
Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca was unable to identify company owners
New Panama Papers Leak Reveals Firm's Chaotic Scramble
“The main purpose of this type of structure has been broken: confidentiality.”
This one email, from a Uruguayan financial planner to Mossack Fonseca
in the wake of our 2016 Panama Papers investigation, really sums up the
response to our newest investigation.
As our director, Gerard Ryle, often says: What the offshore industry is really selling is secrecy.
Today we are going back to April 2016, and the aftermath of Panama
Papers. We’ve been offered a rare opportunity in journalism: to see
(courtesy of a new leak of 1.2 million files) how the company at the
center of that global investigation responded.
Chaos, about sums it up.
The offshore law firm scrambled to work out the identities of the true
owners of 70 percent of the companies it had established in the British
Virgin Islands. The British Virgin Islands was revealed by our original
investigation to be Mossack Fonseca’s most popular tax haven. It was
also among the overseas territories targeted by the United Kingdom in
its recent crackdown on dirty money.
One client, who was trying to
identify company owners on Mossack Fonseca's behalf, said the Panamanian
law firm made them look like “amateurs” and a “Mickey Mouse operation”
(read the expletive-laced email here.)
As one offshore expert and lawyer told our reporter, it’s just “crazy as crazy can be” that they didn’t have this information.
Our latest investigation reveals the back-and-forth correspondence
between Mossack Fonseca employees, and it also shows how the company
reacted. The firm slashed its fees, and some employees moved to other
legal outfits who would take on the old clients.
But, if all that
isn’t enough for you, our new data reveals the criminal investigations
sparked by the Panama Papers that nobody knew about. For example, a
mining company listed on the London stock exchange was investigated for
alleged bribery in Kazakhstan and Africa just two months after
publication.
We also uncovered more offshore details about an array
of global elites, including soccer star Lionel Messi and the heirs to
iconic French jeweler *Cartier.
Stay tuned as our partners across the globe publish more stories!
**** Data at https://www.icij.org/data/
The horror story that followed the Panama Papers
Exclusive by Neil Chenoweth in AFR
In April 2016 the world was rocked by the Panama Papers, explosive
revelations from the leak of 11.5 million documents from a Panama law
firm, Mossack Fonseca.
The repercussions were immediate and
major for those named in the files – the Australian Tax Office announced
on day one that it had identified 800 Australian clients of Mossack
Fonseca and Commissioner Chris Jordan led a world-first collaboration of
37 counties to investigate the Panama data.
But while the
media exposure was harrowing, what followed was far worse, as tens of
thousands of clients of the Panama firm faced a horrifying ordeal trying
to escape the Mossack Fonseca universe.
We know just how
horrifying it was, because lightning has struck twice – a second leak of
1.2 million additional records from Mossack Fonseca, has been obtained
by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung in a project led by the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in Washingto
The horror story that followed the Panama Papers
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