In the last few days, every news channel and news website you’ve visited has one thing running prominently: The Panama Papers.
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The Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca helped thousands of rich and famous people as well as global corporations set up shell companies and offshore accounts to avoid taxes in their home states. It’s not out of any anti-Americanism or fear of the Internal Revenue Service.
Sweden’s Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said on Swedish television on Monday: “I think it is shameful that they have been involved in this”. Some suspect the USA government is the culprit, given the lack of Americans in the ledger of guilty parties exposed by the hack.
Ramon Fonseca said, “we have a technical report that we were hacked by servers overseas”.
“We are working closely with a number of other agencies who are also looking at this”, it added.
The report described Mossack Fonseca as “one of the world’s five biggest wholesalers of offshore secrecy”. He said business rules have tightened and that his company has adhered to them.
While holding money in offshore companies is not illegal, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which has been reviewing the documents along with dozens of other media organisations, said they could provide evidence of wealth hidden for tax evasion, money laundering, sanctions busting, drug deals or other crimes.
Lack of transparency in legal and administrative dealings.
Correspondents say the president is eager to defend his country against a “media attack” by wealthy countries that he says are unfairly stigmatising him following the leak. They had paid 12,497 pounds for the shares in 1997.
Also, Hong Kong has as many as 37,700 offshore companies registered in Panama through Mossack Fonseca, the most in the world, compared with 34,300 in Switzerland and 32,700 in Britain.
Currently EU states have broadly different national lists of so-called non-cooperative jurisdictions on tax matters and are free to decide whether to impose restrictive measures.
The Guardian reported that Sharif’s daughter Maryam was the beneficial owner of two offshore companies that each own flats on the prestigious Park Lane. “We have a theory and we are following it”.
They enable individuals and companies to open shell companies and hide their identity or assets through stringent privacy regulation.
“We’re not flawless and some surely escape by”, he said.
“We are amazed that nobody has said, ‘Hey, a crime has been committed here, ‘” Fonseca told Reuters.
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Associated Press writer Juan Zamorano reported this story in Panama City and AP writer Joshua Goodman reported from Bogota, Colombia.
