Germany issues arrest warrants for owners of firm behind Panama Papers scandal
German authorities have issued an
international arrest warrant for the former owners of the law firm at the core
of 2016’s huge tax evasion scandal, which was revealed in the Panama Papers
data leak.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on
Monday evening that the public prosecutor’s office in Cologne has issued arrest
warrants for Germany-born Jürgen Mossack (72) and his former partner Ramón
Fonseca (68), founders of the company Mossack Fonseca, accusing them of aiding
tax evasion and associating with criminals.
The two men will be arrested if
they enter the European Union. They are currently living in Panama, which does
not extradite its passport-holding citizens. The FBI are also reportedly
investigating the two men as well.
The company itself, which had been
set up in the 1980s, was closed down in 2018, in the wake of the Panama Papers
revelations on how it facilitated complex webs of money laundering and tax
evasion, and helped criminals and the super-wealthy to hide their money via
networks of shell companies.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung received
the massive data drop of over 11 million documents, and worked together with
some 400 journalists in the International Consortium of Investigative
Journalists, to analyse the data before publishing the results in April 2016.
The fallout from the scandal was
far-reaching: former heads of state including Iceland’s then-prime minister
Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson, and the former prime minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif,
were forced to resign.
In September 2020, a federal judge
in the US sentenced Harald Joachim von der Goltz to four years in prison for
wire and tax fraud and money laundering, making him the first US taxpayer to be
sentenced based on the Panama Papers data.
There have been some 150
investigations opened into tax evasion and money laundering in over 80
countries based on the information from the data drop. The Süddeutsche Zeitung
said that some 2,000 cases were instigated against alleged tax evaders in
Germany alone.
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