The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has called a special meeting of tax administrators from leading economies on April 13 in Paris to coordinate worldwide responses to the Mossack Fonseca files, popularly known as “Panama Papers”. One such is British prime minister David Cameron who was reluctantly forced to admit that he had benefited from his late father’s offshore fund. Rather, he said, his firm’s investigation had determined it’d been hacked from the outside. He also said his firm had never destroyed any documents or helped anyone evade taxes or launder money.
Advertisement
From the viewpoint of preventing money laundering and tax evasion, it is important to urge tax haven countries and regions to cooperate to establish such effective measures as sharing bank account information.
Meanwhile, over 500 Indians figure on the firm’s list of offshore companies, foundations and trusts.
 ” At this moment we cannot speak about any crime”, he said, adding the El Salvador office could have been helping in processing global information for the law firm.
Fonseca, who was a senior government official in Panama until March, said “thousands of lawyers around the world” were doing the same “completely legal” work as Mossack Fonseca, which specializes in setting up offshore companies. He attached no date to the ultimatum.
But the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, seized on the Guardian report as a further indication of why the inquiry into the Panama Papers revelations should be independent.
Officials said that the Mossack Fonseca sign was removed a day earlier and an employee indicated that the company is planning to move out.
“We will go and get an internationally recognised expert to go away and have a loot at the disclosure rules in New Zealand and make sure we’re ticking all the boxes”.
Still, Mossack said the resulting media reports had been illuminating for him, as he did not know some of his clients had been tied to Putin or to at least eight present or past members of the Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee.
Advertisement
“What’s required here is an oversight that means that we are clear about what’s in those [foreign] trusts is what should be in those trusts – not illegal activity or assets from offshore that really belong somewhere else”. The foundations claimed beneficiaries such as the Red Cross, a maneuver that kept the companies’ true owners anonymous, while cloaking them in an “NGO aura”.
