Mr. Melendez said the government chose to raid the offices after Mossack Fonseca removed its office sign late on Thursday, a move he claimed raised suspicions.
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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.
And if his firm had known about those connections, “normally in a case like that we would resign, we would stop dealing with that client and with that company”, he said.
Authorities in El Salvador have raided the offices of the Panama law firm at the centre of a massive data leak, the attorney general’s office says.
Partner of the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, Ramon Fonseca speaks during an interview at his office in Panama City, Thursday, April 7, 2016.
According to the BBC, “the company [Mossack Fonseca] has helped clients launder money, dodge sanctions and evade taxes”.
The paper is one of the media outlets investigating the leaked documents from a Panama-based law firm. “The manager said it was because they were moving offices”, the prosecutor’s office said.
In an email correspondence, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the main organization that is coordinating the release and sharing of the documents, said it will release in early May the names of the more than 214,000 offshore entities incorporated by Mossack Fonseca and the people connected to them. Federal prosecutors may also seek to establish jurisdiction over foreign persons to the extent that activities involved United States intermediaries or transactions cleared in USA dollars through correspondent accounts. “(But) first we are going to use diplomacy, dialogue and cooperation”.
After four days fending off headlines about his family’s finances, he acknowledged on Thursday that he and his wife, Samantha, sold shares worth £31,500 (currently $44,300) in an offshore fund named Blairmore Holdings in January 2010-five months before Cameron became prime minister.
However, the Prime Minister has said it was a “fundamental misconception” that the fund was set up to avoid tax, arguing his father was being “unfairly written about”.
Millions of documents leaked to media organisations across Europe apparently show the ways the rich and famous can exploit offshore tax regimes.
The data leak that rocked the global community is still creating questions and have thrust various political and public figureheads into the spotlight, raising questions on off-shore companies and tax evasion.
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It said Toyin Saraki “was a mere business front” for her husband, senate president Bukola Saraki.
