Panama Papers Leak Casts Light on a Law Firm Founded on Secrecy

I read an unconfirmed story this morning that EFCC is set to arrest those Nigerians that their names were found on the Panama Papers leak.... this is laughable! How much investiagtion has EFCC done on these individuals? How much do they know? Issokay, another has done the job and EFCC wants to arrest! Interesting Indeed!!!

Here is all that you need to know about Panama papers leak, just incase you have no knowledge of what we are talking about.
The two men came together in an era of political and economic uncertainty in Panama: One a reserved German immigrant whose father served in the armed wing of the Nazi party, the other a gregarious, aspiring novelist whose family opposed Panama’s military dictatorship.

With the nation still under the sway of Gen. Manuel Noriega, the pair merged their small law firms in 1986, creating what would become a powerhouse of secretive offshore banking for the elite. Over the next three decades, Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca expanded their practice to a staff of 500, with affiliate companies around the world and a client list of the powerful, the famous and, sometimes, the infamous.

In January, a prosecutor investigating the sweeping corruption in Brazil publicly called their law firm “a huge money launderer.”

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The partners had become very wealthy, and Mr. Fonseca leveraged the firm’s success to gain an influential role in the upper ranks of politics. He told associates that he wanted to clean up the

government, serving as a special adviser to President Juan Carlos Varela until the corruption scandal in Brazil forced Mr. Fonseca to resign this year.

In an interview, he said that entering politics was, in part, a way of giving back. “I believe in sharing the pizza,” he wrote. “At least to give others one slice.”

The firm, Mossack Fonseca, was built on assurances of bulletproof privacy for its clients. But its operations were laid bare this week by a vast leak of millions of documents that have helped expose

the proliferation of shell companies and tax havens for the world’s wealthiest people. The revelations have already prompted Iceland’s prime minister to step aside and spurred criminal investigations on at least two continents.

The leak has also brought more scrutiny to Panama’s financial and legal sectors, just as the country’s leadership was trying to shed its longstanding reputation as a haven for the loot of the criminal and corrupt. In February, Panama was removed from a watch list maintained by an international agency that sets standards to combat money laundering and terrorism financing, but it remains under scrutiny as a haven for tax evaders.

Panama’s president has vowed to cooperate with any judicial investigations stemming from the leaked information, which could put him in the awkward position of allowing an inquiry into his former adviser.

Mossack Fonseca has denied that it committed any wrongdoing, and Mr. Fonseca proclaimed his firm’s innocence.

“At the end of this storm the sky will be blue again and people will find that the only crime is the hacking” of the firm’s documents, he said in an hourlong interview conducted over the messaging platform WhatsApp.

But some in Panama who know Mr. Fonseca say the leak’s contents are at odds with how he has tried to portray himself and his role in the country.

Carlos Guevara Mann, a fellow party member and former government official, said he had once asked Mr. Fonseca, already a successful novelist, why he would bother with politics. The lawyer, he recalled, told him that he wanted to set straight the nation’s human rights record.

“When you match that conversation with the fact that the firm was providing services to all of those notorious human rights violators — Qaddafi,

Source: New York Times