S9 Ep135: The Panama Papers (Mossack Fonseca)

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This episode of Swindled may contain graphic descriptions or audio recordings of disturbing events which may not be suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.

I was sitting right there. That's that's where I usually sat. She kind of tapped out this last blog post and she told me I'll be I'll be back right after this appointment and when I'm back you can use the car. And it was a few minutes after that that I I heard this really loud blast. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. Daphne Carwana Galizia typed those words at two thirty five PM on october sixteenth, twenty seventeen and pressed publish.

Minutes later, she said goodbye to her eldest son Matthew, climbed into her car, and set off for the bank to address her frozen accounts. The latest act of retribution imposed by Malta's political class, who had slapped the investigative journalist with yet another libel lawsuit. Seconds later, an explosion shook the windows of the house. Matthew already knew what had happened before he even opened the door. And I knew it was a cobbler straight away.

I saw the logo of Peugeot and at that moment I thought, shit. There was a huge ball of fire that looks like I don't know, the fire of hell. Matthew ran barefoot toward the fireball, roughly one hundred meters down the road from their home in Badnea, Shards of metal and plastic lithered the asphalt, leading to his mother's still burning car, which had been hurled into a nearby field.

I started looking for a stick, and my idea was to use a stick to open the door, he later recalled. Then I looked at the ground and saw a severed leg, foot still attached. It was just awful. The the sound of the horn blaring. There were body parts all over the ground. Matthew knew his mother was dead. The fuel tank had ignited. Even if she had survived the initial blast, she was trapped in a burning car.

Nothing could be done. After that afternoon, neither the Caruana Galizia family nor the country of Malta would ever be the same. Malta's best-known investigative journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia, has been killed in a car bomb near her home. The powerful explosive device destroyed her Peugeot 108, throwing debris into a nearby field. 53-year-old Caruana Galizia Yeah.

leading the hugely popular blog in which she relentlessly focused on cases of alleged high level corruption targeting politicians from across party lines. Who would want to kill Daphne Carwana Galizia? Honestly, uh a lot of people. Powerful people. Daphne had been a thorn in the side of Malta's political elite since she started her career in the early 90s. Her reporting often focused on corruption, nepotism, patronage, and financial crime.

For her work, Daphne was harassed, spat on, and even arrested. Three of the family's dogs were killed over the years. There were repeated attempts to set her home on fire, once while the family slept inside. Instead of backing down, Daphne ramped up her fearless reporting. In March 2008, she launched a blog called Running Commentary, a relentless stream of scathing analysis, sharp insinuation, and rumor-adjacent exposes aimed at Malta's two dominant political parties.

The witch of Benea, as critics referred to Daphne behind her back, wasn't making any friends. Her reporting intensified after Joseph Muscat became Malta's 13th Prime Minister in 2013. Daphne accused his administration of putting the country up for sale from day one. She was particularly incensed by a citizenship program that effectively allowed wealthy foreigners to buy Maltese passports. Daphne called it super tacky and an obvious vehicle for money laundering.

when she received a cease and desist letter, demanding she stopped writing about it. Daphne threatened to print it out, use it to pick up her dog's shit, and mail it back to the lawyers. Her relationship with the Muscat administration only grew more adversarial from there. In twenty fourteen, Energy Minister Conrad Mitzi sued Carowana Galizia for libel after she reported that he had been seen in an intimate embrace with his communications coordinator.

In january twenty seventeen, Economy Minister Chris Cardona filed his own libel suit after Daphne alleged he had visited a brothel in Germany and shared a prostitute with an aide. This is not journalism. This is character assassination It was the forty eighth libel case filed against her. In fact, lawsuits targeting Daphne Carwana Galizia accounted for roughly ninety percent of all libel actions in Malta during that time period. She did not lose a single one while she was alive.

Salacious gossip and personal misconduct made up only a fraction of her work, however. At the time of her death, Daphne was pursuing something far more consequential. A whistleblower had alerted her to an alleged bribery scheme involving the Prime Minister, senior members of his administration, and a private energy consortium known as ElectroGas. According to the whistleblower, Jorgen Finnick.

Co-director of Electrogas had routed payments through offshore shell companies to individuals linked to the Muscat government in exchange for securing a long-term contract to build and operate a power plant and related infrastructure. These companies were set up when they were already in office. So it is quite obvious that they are used for money laundering purposes. The fruit of corruption, backhanders, kickbacks, grafts, that kind of thing. These shell companies were central to the scheme.

Beyond tax avoidance, they provide a level of anonymity designed to obscure ownership and conceal the movement of money. They can be used to cloak illicit proceeds, evade sanctions, hide assets, pay hush money to a porn star, accept bribes, or launder funds through layers of intermediary stuff. Cash moves in and out without being traceable to the true beneficiary. The structure is effective, and in most cases, entirely legal.

The allegations that members of the Maltese government were controlling offshore accounts was plausible, but Daphne needed proof. She needed the names of the companies, their jurisdictions, and their actual ownership.

And given how the structures were designed, obtaining that information would be difficult. But then, in april twenty sixteen, Something happened that would lend credence to her theory, and in the process set Daphne Carwana Galizia on a path that would ultimately lead to her untimely demise. Daphne came to believe the Prime Minister and his allies had accepted bribes from Jorgen Fenneck, co-director of Electrogas. In return, Daphne believed they would hand Fenneck control over the power station.

In twenty sixteen, Daphne claimed she'd found proof in the infamous Panama Papers. The Panama Papers, 2.6 terabytes of data, 11.5 million documents. A paper trail linking more than 200,000 offshore companies across 200 countries. Thousands of names, billions of transactions, and a corresponding story for each dollar that was laundered, stolen, soaked with blood, or quietly concealed. It was not a revelation so much as a confirmation of what we thought we already knew.

It was a rare, documented look at a system designed to operate beyond public and regulatory scrutiny, a rare peek behind the curtain at how the world truly works. The internal files of a Panamanian law firm leak into the hands of investigative reporters who embark on a journalistic collaboration that rattles governments, markets, and reputations across the globe on this episode of Swindled. Never waste it. Millions of dollars.

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Well to be honest it was a very bad day because my kids were really sick and there was a lot of whining and vomiting and I was a little tired and late at night I got this message hi this is John Doe. Are you interested in data? I'm willing to share. In early 2015, investigative journalist Bastion Obermeyer received an anonymous message through an encrypted channel. It read: Hello, this is John Doe. Interested in data.

Without even knowing what it might be, Bastion replied, We're very interested, of course. We meant he and his colleagues at Sudeuts Zeitung, one of Germany's largest and most influential daily newspapers. I would like to assist, John Doe wrote back, but there are a couple of conditions. You need to understand how dangerous and sensitive some of this information is.

My life is in danger if my identity is revealed. Bastion Obermeyer and Sadouts Zitung were the third newsroom John Doe had contacted about the materials they claimed to possess. After a reporter at the New York Times pressed for identifying details, Johndo imposed strict ground rules. Communication would take place only over encrypted channels, there would be no in person meetings, but John Doe made clear, editorial decisions would be left entirely to the journalist.

Bastion Obermeyer agreed to the conditions. John Doe promised a sample and delivered it shortly thereafter. When it arrived, Bastion roped in similarly named but unrelated Frederick Obermeyer, another journalist at the Deutsche Zeitung, to help assess what they had been given. Sometimes even from the first messages can get an a a gut feeling if this is a serious person or if this person on the other end is only boasting and in the end uh telling you bullshit.

John Doe wasn't feeding them bullshit, but it wasn't necessarily earth shattering either. The sample contained a bunch of PDF files, articles of incorporation, contracts, correspondence, and other routine paperwork related to what appeared to be offshore shell companies. The material seems good. Can I see more? Bastion asked, with expectations tempered. John Doe obliged.

The next batch proved far more sensational. Many of the documents were related to companies owned by a Russian national named Sergei Roldugin. The name didn't ring a bell at first, so Bastion and Frederick searched the internet. Turns out Rodugin was no ordinary Russian. He had been Vladimir Putin's closest friend since the 1970s. He had introduced Putin to his future wife. He was the godfather of Putin's eldest daughter.

But the two men took very different paths as they got older. One man rose to become the authoritarian ruler of a nation, widely suspected of amassing vast hidden wealth. The other was a classical cellist and conductor, a sensitive artist with no visible business career and no obvious fortune. In interviews, including one the journalist later found in the New York Times from twenty fourteen, Rodugan insisted he was not rich at all.

And who told the Western newspaper that he's only a musician, no businessman. And at the same time, we found this contract. And this was basically the start uh of a month, several month long investigation in that basically ended up us seeing Mr. Oldogin in in the middle of a center of shock companies that were used to funnel billions of dollars out of Russia.

According to the files supplied by John Doe, Sergei Roldugan held a twelve and a half percent stake in Russia's largest advertising agency. He owned minority stakes in a military truck manufacturer, and in a bank widely described as a Kremlin crony institution. The deals tied to those holdings generated hundreds of millions, possibly billions of dollars, an unusual portfolio for a man who wielded a bow for a living.

Or maybe Vladimir Putin was using a trusted friend as a front for his offshore fortune. Nah, it couldn't be. Putin has gone on record condemning the offshore system as quote unpatriotic. Either way, the information was scandalous and exciting, and according to John Doe, it represented only a fraction of what remained undisclosed. Who are you? Bastion asked the whistleblower, fully expecting to be stonewalled. I'm no one, John Doe replied. Just a concerned citizen.

Why are you doing this? It was a moral obligation, Doe claimed. I want you to report on the material and to make these crimes public. We should discuss what is the best way for me to send you a large amount of material, any ideas? I will have to think about it, Bastion told them. How much data are we talking about? More than anything you have ever seen. That was not an exaggeration.

The volume of material John Doe had access to eclipsed previous leaks, larger than WikiLeaks, larger than the NSA disclosures. But what made it unprecedented was not just the size. This data came from a single source, a single institution, a single database.

Johndo was sitting on the complete internal records of a law firm in Panama that specialized in one service, creating anonymous offshore shell companies. Its name was Mosak von Seca. Mossack Fonseka Una compañía con vasta experiencia y prestigio, construidos en base a una trayectoria que data desde el año 1977. The capacity del Group, su cobertura global and amplia experiencia permitirán brindarle a su compañía un mundo de solutions at su servicio.

Jürgen Mosak was born in Germany and moved to Panama with his family at age thirteen after the country proved suitable as a safe haven for his Nazi father. Mosak later completed a law degree and spent several years working in London, specializing in maritime and shipping law, with an emphasis on minimizing tax and regulatory burdens. In nineteen seventy-seven, Mosak returned to Panama and opened his own practice.

At the same time, another lawyer, Ramon Enrique Fonseca Mora, had come home to his native country to do the same. Fonseca had once considered becoming a priest, but ultimately decided to quote, save the world by working at the United Nations in Geneva. When that ambition failed to materialize, Vonseca established a solo firm in Panama instead.

One of his early clients was Saudi billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. It was through Khashoggi that Vonseca first met Mosak after Khashoggi sold a yacht to a sheik represented by the tall German born lawyer. Mosak and Fonseca hammered out the details of the transaction on behalf of their respective clients and found that they had a good working relationship. This laid the foundation for a far more lucrative partnership down the road.

During this period, Panama was emerging as one of the world's premier offshore banking jurisdictions and tax havens. Foreigners could avoid taxes entirely so long as their income was earned elsewhere. The system also promised near-total secrecy. Company owners were not required to disclose their identities, and the government showed little interest in asking questions. There was only one requirement. Panamanian companies had to be registered exclusively through Panamanian lawyers.

It was a legal bottleneck that turned secrecy into a business model, and that proved highly profitable for lawyers like Ramon Fonseca and Jurgen Mossak. The business truly exploded when Manuel Noriega seized control of Panama in 1983 and aligned himself with Colombian drug cartels. Demand for shell companies and the offshore structures surged. To capitalize on it, the two lawyers combined their practices.

The merger made sense for many reasons. Mosak had the technical expertise and knowledge of corporate architecture. Fonseca brought political access and a growing roster of clients. Together, they were able to dominate company and corporations in Panama and scale the operation rapidly. But the good times were short-lived.

In 1989, the United States invaded Panama. Noriega was arrested, the regime collapsed, and foreign capital fled the country. The uncertainty scared away clients who valued discretion above all else. For Mosak Vonseca, Panama was suddenly a liability. They needed a new tax haven. Fortunately, there was no shortage of options. Bermuda, Bahamas, Belize, Seychelles, but the British Virginia Islands quickly emerged as the firms preferred replacement for the first.

The BVI offered the same tax advantages as Panama, layered with even greater anonymity. It also came with a stable government, minimal competition, and one crucial convenience. Everyone on the island spoke English. The Panamanian law firm rapidly shifted much of its incorporation work there. We created a monster, Ramon Fonseca admitted in a 2008 television interview.

His partner, Jurgen Mosak, chose his words more carefully. His vision, he said, was to build an organization so embedded in global finance that clients couldn't function without it. An organization he suggested like Microsoft. Really? Microsoft In his twenty seventeen book Secrecy World, journalist Jake Bernstein offered a less flattering comparison. Mosak Von Seca, he wrote, was less Microsoft and more McDonald's.

For nearly four decades the firm built a global franchise, opening more than forty offices in places like Switzerland, China, and the Isle of Man, while churning out more than two hundred fifty thousand offshore companies. The firm's business model, admittedly, prized quantity over quality. For an upfront fee of a few hundred dollars, Mosfon would incorporate a company and handle the paperwork.

For an annual fee, a staff member would serve as both the registered agent and a nominee director, the official public facing representative of the company. In practice, this director was often a poorly paid employee whose job amounted to signing blank documents for future use. On paper, some of these individuals controlled tens of thousands of companies at once.

The real control belonged to the ultimate beneficial owner, or UBO, who remained hidden behind a power of attorney that granted access to bank accounts and assets without their name ever appearing on the company's records.

In many cases, Mosak von Seca did not even know who these owners were. The firm dealt almost exclusively with intermediaries such as banks, accountants, and wealth managers, who shopped for offshore structures, the way one might browse a catalog, selecting jurisdictions, privacy levels, and add ons.

For example, for an additional fee, clients could even buy a prepackaged shelf company, an entity that had been sitting idle for years, aging like a fine wine, giving it the added appearance of respectability and legitimacy. This deliberate distance between the company's true owners and the law firm gave Mosak Fonseca a veneer of plausible deniability.

The firm could claim ignorance about the businesses it helped create, even as it openly advised clients on which tax havens offered the most privacy, how to purchase real estate anonymously, and which banks were least concerned with due diligence. When direct communication with beneficial owners became unavoidable, fake email accounts were created under fictional names. Messages began with greetings like Dear Winnie the Pooh, or Thank you, Mr. Harry Potter.

The way the system is set up, you can have a certain remove. Right? So I am not really responsible for what this company does. I'm just selling a company to a banker or a lawyer or an accountant and then they in turn are the ones who who really bear the responsibility. And it becomes sort of a hot potato.

Bastion Obermeyer and Frederick Obermeyer were already familiar with Mosak von Secum, long before John Doe made contact with the In 2013, they were invited to participate in an offshore leaks investigation led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists after data from two smaller incorporation firms was obtained.

Those documents showed how drug traffickers and blood diamond dealers relied on companies formed by Mosak Fonseca, as did associates of barbaric dictators, including Muramar Gaddafi, Robert Mugabe, and Bashar al-Assad. Offshore leaks also revealed something else. Mosak Fonseca functioned as a near perfect black box. When a paper trail led to the Panamanian firm, it typically meant a journalistic dead end. The documents suggested wrongdoing, but the firm itself remained impenetrable.

Still, the 2013 leaks marked the first significant crack in the offshore secrecy system, and what John Doe was providing to the German journalists now went far beyond that. This was the first time the full scale of the machinery had been exposed. Because for us as Germans,

It was great to see that Mossack von Seca was organized in a very German way. Um it was uh properly organized so we had folders and in one folder you had the whole chronology from the fun uh the uh uh founding of uh uh company through the communication um and the back and forth between the company, the UBO or other serv financial service providers.

Each batch arrived meticulously organized, folders labeled by company ID, email chains intact, documents tracing the life of an offshore entity, from incorporation as far back as nineteen seventy seven to the present day. Corporate registries identified the true beneficial owners, occasionally accompanied by scant copies of their passports. Correspondence with intermediaries involved some of the world's largest banks, including Deutsche Bank and HSBC. Some of the files were just a few days old.

John Doe delivered the documents by the millions.

The scale of Mosaka Fonseca's operation was breathtaking. Even more startling, it was only the fourth largest provider of its kind. Economists estimate that eight to ten percent of the world's private wealth, about seven to ten trillion dollars, is held offshore. There's an entire parallel economy, an alternate reality, where the wealthy, not just criminals, park their money. Unaccountable, difficult to trace, and often untaxed.

Hiding money, money laundering and tax evasion is not limited to a special part of um the world. It's not only a developed world problem nor only a undeveloped world um problem. It is a it's a global problem. It affec and it affects all of us because um the victims, that's all of us. And everyone knows it's happening. It's understood, accepted, and even celebrated by the naive among us who earnestly believe some day their ship is going to come in.

But this isn't simply clever financial maneuvering or acute little tax avoidance scheme. It's an enemy to civilization, a systematic eradication of the most basic social contract. World hunger, extreme inequality, skyrocketing inflation, unaffordable housing, endless war, all symptoms of an offshore financial system that you don't have access to.

Instead, Johnny Paycheck puts basic necessities on layaway and drives to work every day on crumbling infrastructure, wondering how he's going to pay off his children's school cafeteria debt. while some gluttonous turkey necked executive simply opts out of the obligation, terrified they might have to contribute even a fraction back to the society that made their wealth possible in the first place.

They, the financial elite, the one per cent, the billionaire class, whatever you want to call them, are no longer participating. They're not holding up their end of the bargain. So the burden falls upon you. By design, They write the laws, they shape the enforcement, and they will take extreme measures to keep it that way.

Why are you taking this risk? Bastion asked John Doe. It's too important, they replied. There's just a mind-boggling amount of criminal activity going on here. I struggle to even wrap my head around it. Bastion and Frederick were struggling to wrap their heads around it, too. Well it started only with a bunch of data. So in the beginning we thought it looks good. Then after we found the best friend of Vladimir Putin we thought this is going to be good.

And when we needed to have a list for the heads of state that we found in the data, we knew this is this is a bombshell. Bankers, aristocrats, organized crime, government officials, Ponzi schemers, heads of state, All of them appeared in the data that the German journalists were receiving, and every continent was represented.

It became clear almost immediately that the breadth of the material far exceeded what a small team at a regional newspaper could responsibly handle on its own. The decision that followed ran afoul of every journalistic instinct Bastion and Frederick had been taught. They chose to share the scoop.

There were practical reasons for doing so. Safety, for one. The story spread across dozens of newsrooms is more challenging to silence than one held by two no disrespect, relatively small time reporters in Munich. And then there was the volume. The data contained far more stories than the Obermeyers could ever uncover on their own, and no guarantee they would even recognize their significance if they did.

The impact would be exponentially greater if journalists around the world searched the data for what they understood best. African reporters tracing African names, British reporters following UK connections, local experts decoding local power structures. Strength lay in numbers, and Bastion and Frederick wanted the findings to be as loud, as unavoidable, and as difficult to suppress as possible.

Because we thought when when we the two Germans are already able to find dozens of traces of scandals in this data, imagine what a group of hundred or even two hundred journalists um could find. They called Jared Ryle. He was the director of the Washington, DC based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and someone they had worked with before.

The ICIJ is essentially a coordination hub to help reporters collaborate across continents, manage massive datasets, and publish findings in multiple languages. It was precisely the model Bastion and Frederick had in mind. But Ryle was cautious. Offshore again? he wondered. It sounded like familiar territory.

But I wasn't initially convinced that this was big. We knew that Massacre Fonseca was a notorious law firm. It was one of the top five firms in the world for setting up um offshore accounts for clients basically around the world. And it was well known that one of their clients was Mugabe and Gaddafi was another client and this kind of had been written about before so we knew it was an interesting firm.

After three weeks of persistent prodding, Bastion Obermeier persuaded Jared Ryle to fly to Munich and review the data firsthand. Inside the Sadoitcha Zaitan offices, Ryo quickly understood that this was unlike anything the ICIJ had seen before. They cross-checked the files against prior leaks and court records. Everything checked out. The source was real. The ICIJ was officially on board. And at that point it was clear to me that yes, this was different. This was big.

And uh and my next stop was London where I basically um met with the Guardian and the BBC and I began to um build the collaboration that would eventually happen. Ryo began by securing major outlets in the UK, bringing the Guardian and BBC into the group. He understood that once a few powerful institutions committed, smaller newsrooms would follow.

He was right. Within weeks, partners joined across the globe, including La Nation in Argentina, Le Monde in France, La Prinza in Panama, and McClatchy, whose holdings included the Miami Herald. Ultimately, the effort, codenamed Prometheus, would turn into the most extensive journalistic collaboration in history.

More than four hundred journalists in over eighty countries, working across twenty five languages, raced to keep pace with John Doe's steady stream of material, which had to be processed, reconstructed, and scanned into searchable formats. It was a monumental undertaking. In total, the leak would reach 2.6 terabytes and eleven and a half million documents, the largest data breach journalism had ever attempted to process.

And if it was going to be successful, there needed to be some rules, which were laid out during a series of closed door meetings held in Munich, Washington, and other locations throughout the summer of twenty fifteen. Um just mostly because it's uh First, share everything. Leads, context, discoveries, credit, no hoarding, no exclusive. Second, secure everything. Files encrypted, hardware locked down.

As the Deutsche Zeitung, for instance, Bastion and Frederick worked on terminals that had never been connected to the internet. Their hard drives were stored in a safe, and the screws on their computers were coated with glitter nail polish, so any tampering would be immediately evident. Third, say nothing. Do not tell anybody what you are working on. Not your co workers, not your friends, not your family. It's for your own safety.

And finally, for maximum impact, everyone must agree to publish simultaneously on the same date, April 3, 2016, the day the Panama Papers would change the world. The following is a paid advertisement for the Swindle Valued Listener Rewards Program. Are you tired of hearing advertisements in swindle like this one? Do you wish there was more swindled content to distract you from your miserable existence?

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Ladies and gentlemen, it's a pleasure for me to be here at Iceland Investment Forum. It takes time for any given country to resurface from political turmoil after a large scale economic crisis. We've already made significant progress, and I'm convinced that the policy this government has put forward is a sound one and that it will bring further benefits. Hope to see you and your money in Iceland.

Before entering politics, Sigmundur David Gunlauksen was a familiar face on Icelandic television, working as a reporter for the country's public broadcasting service. He was also, according to voters in 2004, the nation's third sexiest man. However, Gunlaugsen's media career ended abruptly after the 2008 banking collapse devastated the small Scandinavian country.

He pivoted the activism, emerging as the outspoken leader of a grassroots organization called Indefense, which opposed using public funds to repay foreign creditors who had loaned staggering sums to Iceland's three largest banks. Those banks had ballooned to nearly ten times the country's value. GDP before collapsing, in part by using offshore shell companies to secretly buy and artificially inflate their own stock prices.

Thirty eight year old Sigmundr Gunlaugsen rode that anger and slick populist rhetoric into office, becoming Iceland's youngest elected Prime Minister in twenty thirteen, He campaigned on economic renewal and promised to hold the financial vultures responsible for the crash to account. What he did not disclose was that he and his billionaire heiress wife were themselves financial vultures.

The Panama Papers revealed the couple owned an offshore company holding millions of dollars in bonds tied to the failed banks, positions that may have profited from their collapse. It was called Winter's Inc., it was based in the British Virgin Islands and registered through Mossac von Seca in two thousand seven.

And not only did Gunlauksen not disclose this holding to the people of Iceland, as the office requires, but there was evidence that he tried to hide it, as his political career gained momentum in the years following the crash. The future Prime Minister sold his half of Winchus to his wife for one dollar.

You know, this was at a time when he was um really taking up the cause of of in in his words, you know, to protect uh Icelanders from foreign uh uh vultures who were trying to, you know, pick through the remains of the of the of the crash banks and and and profit. The conflict of the interest was so glaring that one could see it from half a world away in Washington, DC.

Still, the ICIJ wanted someone on the ground in Iceland to dig into the story. They invited the country's most prominent investigative reporter, Johannes Christiansen, to join the project. Freelancing at the time, Chris Janssen threw himself into the work, quickly grasping the political consequences of what the documents revealed.

He honored the code of silence absolutely, turning down other assignments and speaking to no one except his wife for nine months. He even covered his windows with tarps to keep prying eyes out. Jared Ryle, the director of the ICIJ, later described Chris Johnson's existence during that period as that of the loneliest man in the world.

Walking on a a story like this in Iceland where where uh if you go out you always meet someone you you know. I I knew from the start that I had to be isolated walking on this. I I I I couldn't talk about the story with almost anyone. Secrets travel fast in Iceland's close knit society. Chris Johnson understood that he couldn't start making calls or asking questions about WinterSync without alerting the very people he was investigating. Instead, he chose confrontation.

Chris Johnson wanted Sigmund Rugunlaugsen to answer for the offshore company on camera, but that would require a bit of subterfuge. An interview request from Iceland's most recognizable investigative journalist would surely ring alarm bells at the Prime Minister's office. So Kristjansson enlisted Sven Bergmann, a Swedish journalist from SVT,

Bergmann requested an interview with Gunlaugsen under the pretext of discussing Iceland's dramatic recovery from the financial crisis. The Prime Minister agreed. Once the cameras were rolling, the plan was simple. Serve Gunlaugsen some softballs before ambushing him with direct questions about his undisclosed offshore company, and then watch him squirm. And wow did he ever So are you comfortable there?

Yes. Uh w what is the uh the main theme? Uh the main theme is the the the crash, but not the crash. The interview took place on march eleventh, twenty sixteen, inside the official residence of Iceland's prime minister. Sven Bergmann put Gunlaugsen at ease with questions about football and about Iceland itself before easing into the economy. What do you personally think about people and companies that are using well tax havens for hiding assets for example?

Well, uh in in Iceland, like in most Nordic societies, or all Nordic societies I suppose, we attach a lot of importance to everybody paying his uh share. Because uh we have a a big uh w well society is is seen as a big project that everybody needs to take part in. So when somebody is uh is cheating the rest of society, uh it is taken very seriously in Islam.

Gunlaugsen's response set the trap perfectly. What follows is the sound of a head of government realizing in real time that their world is collapsing. It's best uh let the footage speak for itself. Enjoy. What about yourself, uh, Mr Prime Minister? Have you or did you have any connections yourself to an offshore company? uh uh uh Icelandic companies and I I have worked with Icelandic companies, had connections with also companies, even the uh the uh what's it called, the workers' units.

So that's what have been. any of my as I my assets uh hidden anywhere. And uh it's uh it's an unusual question for I for an Icelandic politician to get. It's almost like being uh accused of of something. But uh I I can I can confirm that uh I have never hidden any of my Sorry for being rude, that's not what I want to do. I just wanted to ask you personally that uh so the case is that you have never had whatsoever any connection to an offshore company yourself.

Uh as I say, uh my uh assets have always been uh up on the table. Mr. Prime Minister, what can you tell me about a company called Vintri? Well, uh It's a company, if I recall correctly, which is associated with one of the companies that I was on a board of. It was uh had been a comfortable which, as I as I mentioned, has been with the tax uh uh on the tax account uh since it was established.

So uh now I'm starting to feel uh a bit strange about these questions because it's like you were accusing me of something when you were asking me about a coun uh a company that uh has been on my uh tax return Det måste vara okej för mig som journalist.

Yes. No, I'm just asking you questions. So so but to go into the details I would like my partner to do it in Icelandic because I don't have the details. Uh Johannes Christensen then stepped in, asking follow up questions in the Prime Minister's native tongue. Gun Lao Xen refused to answer, stood up and walked out, disappearing through the nearest door into his kitchen.

That interview wouldn't air on television for another three weeks, but a world leader's hypocrisy and betrayal unfolding in plain view would surely elicit an explosive reaction. And given what else the journalists behind the Panama Papers were uncovering and preparing to publish, Iceland would not be alone in its anger.

Argentina's president Mauricio McCree, elected on the platform of transparency and anti-corruption, appeared in the records as a director of an offshore company called FLEG Trading Limited, alongside his father and brother. The King of Saudi Arabia, Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, controlled luxury properties in London and a yacht through Shell Company's. The children of Pakistani Prime Minister, Nawal Sharif, also owned property in London, purchased through offshore companies.

as did the President of the United Arab Emirates, and the Vice President of Iraq, and the Prime Minister of Qatar, and relatives of about eight current or former members of China's ruling elite. In total, the Panama Papers identified dozens of heads of state and hundreds of current and former government officials worldwide, many of whom had previously spoken in public about integrity, reform, and accountability. Kind of like this.

Some of these schemes where people are parking huge amounts of money offshore and taking loans back to just minimize their tax rates, it is not morally acceptable. That's David Cameron, the United Kingdom's Prime Minister at the time. His own name did not appear in the leak.

but his father's did. Ian Cameron, who died in twenty ten, was one of five directors of Blairmore Holdings, the Bahamas Registered Investment Fund, explicitly structured to avoid paying UK taxes, Again, to be clear, simply owning shares in an offshore company is not illegal, and does not automatically mean the activity in which it is engaged is immoral or criminal. But sometimes it does.

We came across the name of a company that had been alleged by the US Department of Treasury as having supplied oil and fuel to the government of Syria. And as we all know, Syria's been involved in a very deadly um barrel bomb fueled war over many years. That's Will Fitzgibbon at the ICIJ. The company he's referring to was owned by Rami McLuff. The billionaire cousin of Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad McCloof controlled vast segments of Syria's economy.

and was widely regarded as the country's wealthiest individual. He was placed under international sanctions for helping finance and sustain the Saj regime, including its campaign of mass repression and human rights abuses On paper, McCloof was cut off from the global financial system. But in practice, the Panama Papers showed that MacLouf continued to conduct business internationally through at least six offshore companies.

registered with Mosak von Seika, using secrecy jurisdictions to rout money, hold assets, and bypass restrictions designed to isolate him. And he wasn't the first one to do it either. North Korea blacklisted by essentially everybody, had used similar methods. Mosak Fonseca registered a British Virgin Islands company, later linked to financing Kim Jong il's nuclear weapons program.

The Panama Papers also illuminated how Africa has been systematically plundered. Bribes are paid, natural resources are extracted, profits disappear. Instead of being reinvested in countries that desperately need them, the money is routed offshore, hidden in shell companies, shielded from taxes, and removed from public accountability. And law firms like Mosak Fonseca made it all relatively painless.

For the profiteers, at least. As for individual bad actors, Eugenio Curatola, often called Argentina's Bernie Madoff, used Mosak Fonseca to hide roughly$90 million in proceeds from an investment fraud.

Fidentia, a South African asset management firm owned by J. Arthur Brown, relied on the Panamanian law firm to create offshore entities used to siphon hundreds of millions of dollars from trust funds meant to benefit mining widows and orphans, Officials at FIFA showed up in the documents too, but that's hardly surprising. Speaking of football, however, Lionel Messi, arguably the world's most famous athlete and convicted tax cheat, was also found in a leak.

As were other celebrities like movie star Jackie Chan, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, television producer Simon Cow, chess champion Bobby Fisher, and even Princess Diana's former butler, if that counts. It doesn't. Anyway, what did any of this actually mean? What would happen once this information and much, much more became public? Would the off shore system finally be dismantled?

Would the criminals be identified and prosecuted in their respective countries? Would the politicians be dragged and then in front of their children and then And the town square. Ah a boy can dream. But there was only one way to find out.

Turned out of the banking bombshell causing shockwaves around the world. Bombshell revelations. A blockbuster release. The largest ever document leak is giving us an unprecedented look inside offshore tax havens. It's being called the biggest leak in the history of journalism. The Panama Papers. The Panama Papers. Details are emerging from a giant leak of confidential documents, the so called Panama Papers.

Several world leaders are under fire this morning after being implicated in the so-called Panama Papers. They found proof of over 200,000 offshore accounts. From many a private and public figure. Among them twelve government leaders, six of them currently in power, 128 politicians and public officials, 29 of the 500 richest people in the world.

The unprecedented leak is expected to have international ramifications and put pressure on governments around the world to crack down on tax minimization and the criminal underbelly of the tax haven industry. Around 6 p.m. European time on Sunday, April 3, 2016, the publishing embargo was lifted. So Deutsche Zaitung posted its year long investigation into the Panama Papers almost immediately, trailed closely by The Guardian and BBC News.

Hours later, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Miami Herald released their coverage in the United States, with dozens of other international outlets following close behind. The carefully coordinated, near simultaneous publications set off a rolling wave of breaking news that spread across the globe. John Doe, the anonymous source behind the leak, later recalled the moment the stories went live.

I remember seeing the posts fly by on social media by the thousands, Doe said, claiming they were having a meal with friends at the time. I did my best to act the way anyone else hearing about it for the first time would have. The ramifications of the revelations were almost immediate. Investigations were launched in country after country, targeting the financial dealings of hundreds of individuals. Protests erupted wherever government leaders were implicated. The first domino fell in Iceland.

Thousands of Icelanders took to the streets calling on the Prime Minister to resign following allegations he benefited from offshore holdings in tax havens. Singwender Gunlaugsen and his wife are cited in the so-called Panama Papers as having hidden millions of dollars of investments in Icelandic banks through a company registered in the British Virgin Islands.

Johannes Christjanssen and Sven Bergman's damning interview with Sigmundra Gunlaugsen aired the same evening the Panama Papers' stories were published. By the following morning, more than twenty thousand people had gathered outside the Icelandic Parliament building in Reykidick. It was the largest protest in the country's history.

Gunlauxen resigned two days later, but the public was not appeased. A third of the cabinet had also been named in the leaked documents, and the man tapped to replace Gun Laoxen openly suggested that the former Prime Minister had done nothing wrong. People basically came out to protest the ethical collapse they experienced through this really unique TV broadcast on Sunday night.

So they were not only calling for the Prime Minister to go, but they want the government to go as well. Similar demands were being made in Argentina. Protesters in the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires, are calling for the country's president to step down. This after the so-called Panama papers revealed Mauricio Macri is on the board of two offshore firms, one in the Bahamas. the other in Panama. He did not declare either when he became the city's mayor or the country's president.

McCree remained in office for another three years after the Panama Papers were published. Ten thousand kilometers away, David Cameron and the UK had also clumsily but successfully weathered the storm, only to resign a few months later after losing the Brexit referendum vote he called. Well, it's not been a great week. I I know that I should have handled this better.

In Pakistan, the Panama Papers ultimately led to the removal of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif from office in twenty seventeen, and Spain, the acting industry minister, Jose Manuel Soria, resigned. In Tunisia, the ICIJ partner newspaper Inkifada was hacked. In Venezuela, journalists who worked on the investigation were fired. In Azerbaijan, a brief military escalation was used to divert attention away from the revelations. In China, nothing happened at all.

Coverage of the Panama Papers was swiftly and comprehensively censored online. The Russian response was just as predictable. The Kremlin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, whose own wife was listed in the files, dismissed the connections journalists made to the president as putinophobia, an affliction, he said. suffered by many in the West. In in our understanding this is nothing else by but a reflection of uh let's say uh an overwhelmed uh Putinophobia disease.

That unfortunately is quite spread now in uh in in lots of media, uh first of all in Anglo Saxon media. Putin himself later made demonstrably false claims that Sodouts' Zaitung was owned by Goldman Sachs and that the entire Panama Papers project was a CIA operation designed to manipulate elections.

In public, Russian officials acted indifferent toward the exposure of their secret financial dealings, but their true feelings became obvious when photos of the local journalist who had worked with ICIJ on the Panama Papers were plastered across TV screens. Soon after, a heavily propagandized docudrama about the leak featured a Johndo whistleblower-type character, suffering a torture-induced head wound during the opening credits.

Before a cartoon boat sails through the pool of his blood as though it were the Panama Canal. Message received, meanwhile, elsewhere in the world. Here's several thousand people filled a square in Malta's capital on Sunday and demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat after the leaked Panama papers said two of its political allies. Had offshore accounts for

A storm was brewing in Malta. The Panama Papers revealed that two of the government's most powerful insiders were clients of Mosak Fonseca. One shell company, Hernville Inc., was controlled by Conrad Mitzi, Malta's Minister for Energy and Health. Another, Tilgate Inc., belonged to Keith Skimbrick, the chief of staff to Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, Both entities were designed to obscure ownership and shield funds from tax authorities. Critics allege they were created to accept bribes.

Mitsi and Skimbury both acknowledged that they controlled the companies, but they insisted that they did not realize their arrangements required disclosure. The claims of ignorance did little to calm the outrage. Amid mounting pressure, both men resigned. The revelations seemed to vindicate Daphne Carwana Galizia, who had spent months warning the public that members of Malta's government were secretly operating offshore shell companies, but the scandal was far from over.

A third Maltese company had surfaced in the Panama Papers, one whose beneficial owner could not be identified. Its name was E. Grant Incorporated, and about a year later Daphne said she had finally learned who was behind it. Citing information from a whistleblower, she published the claim on her blog on april twenty sixth, twenty seventeen. The owner of Egrant, she wrote, was Mrs. Michelle Muscat, the Prime Minister's wife.

It was the most explosive allegation yet, one that pushed the Panama paper scandals from ministerial misconduct straight into the Prime Minister's home. Joseph Muscat angrily denied the claim, calling it the biggest political lie ever told. il lung del Gidba, muxbissija confermata, sdija ecce certificata. Daphne's investigation didn't end there. Lurking behind the Panama Companies was another entity, one that wasn't a Mosac Fonseca client, and therefore never appeared in the leak.

but was mentioned as a quote, target client, poised to funnel vast sums of money into the three Maltese shell companies that did. It was called 17 Black, and it was central to everything Daphne was uncovering, the missing financial engine that made the entire arrangement make sense. Daphne Carwana Galizia was closing in on the company's true owner when she was murdered, silencing her just as the final piece of the puzzle was coming into focus.

They tried framing her, they tried arresting her, they tried suing her they couldn't stop her using any of those means. So they just killed her.

Within months, police in Malta tracked down the cell phones used to trigger the bomb that was placed under Daphne's car seat. The devices belonged to Alfred and George DeGiorgio, a pair of street-level career criminal brothers who were obviously hired guns. But the investigation stalled, years passed with no movement up the chain, persuading many Maltese that those tasked with solving the murder were the very people with an interest and sweeping it under the rug.

Then, in november twenty nineteen, the case broke open. The middleman, who connected the DeGiorgio brothers to the person who ordered the killing, was identified and agreed to cooperate in exchange for a pardon. The financier and mastermind behind Daphne's assassination, he told investigators, was Jorgen Finneck, the businessman deeply involved in Malta's controversial electro gas power station deal.

The same Jorgen Finick, whom a group of journalists calling themselves the Daphne Project had recently identified as being the owner of 17 Black. Just days after the arrest of the alleged middleman in the murder of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia from Malta, police have now arrested one of the country's most prominent businessmen in connection to the case. Jorgen Fenneck was arrested this morning aboard his private yacht as he tried to sail.

From Valletta, the other suspect already in custody was offered a pardon by the country's prime minister to disclose the masterminds behind the crime. Caruana Galizia was killed in a car bomb attack more than two years ago. Jorgen Finneck denies the charges and has yet to stand trial. Five others, including the DeGiorgio brothers who confessed, their accomplice, and the bomb makers, have been convicted.

Joseph Muscat resigned as Malta's Prime Minister in january twenty twenty due to the intense public and political pressure following Daphne's murder. No direct evidence has ever linked his administration to the car bombing, but an independent public inquiry admonished the government for failing to protect her by creating a culture of impunity

It was fundamentally a question of public accountability. I think across my mother's career t there was never much justice for any of the past crimes in order. And obviously the people who perpetrated these crimes or people who wanted to engage in criminality became more and more brazen because they kept testing the the limits of what they could get away with.

And that's how they be became brazen enough to assassinate my mother. When you see what they did on that day, when they turned my mother's car into b a ball of fire. And I feel like we're never going to be able to rest until we get full justice for my mother. Support for Swindled comes from avocado green mattress.

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This is John Doe. Income inequality is one of the defining issues of our time. It affects all of us, the world over. The debate over its sudden acceleration has raged for years, with politicians, academics and activists alike, helpless to stop its steady growth. Despite countless speeches, statistical analyses, a few meeker protests, and the occasional documentary. Still, questions remain. Why? And why now? The Panama Papers provide the Panama.

Massive pervasive corruption. About a month after the Panama Papers were published, the anonymous source spy in the leak, known only as John Doe, released a manifesto titled The Revolution Will Be Digitized. The text was authenticated by journalist Bastion Obermeyer and Frederick Obermeyer as the Deutsche Zeitung, who remained in direct contact with the whistleblower.

In the manifesto, John Doe explains that the decision to expose Mosak von Seca stemmed from a belief that its founders, employees, and clients should be held accountable for their roles and the sordid acts documented in the files.

Only some of which have come to light thus far, Doe noted, adding that it would take years, possibly decades, for the full scope of these crimes to be understood. At the same time, John Doe wrote that, while the global debate sparked by the Panama Papers was encouraged.

Encouraging, it was also dangerously limited. The fixation on legality, on who did what and when missed the larger point. The mere existence of a vast, parallel financial system was itself evidence of failure by governments and the media. the like. The cumulative effect of those failures, Doe argued, quote, has been a complete erosion of ethical standards, ultimately leading to a novel system we still call capitalism, but which is tantamount to economic slavery. In this system,

System, our system, John Doe writes. The slaves are unaware both of their status and of their masters, who exist in a world apart where the intangible shackles are carefully hidden amongst reams of unreachable legalese. The horrific magnitude of detriment to the world should shock us all awake, but when it takes a whistleblower to sound the alarm, it is cause for even greater concern.

It signals that democracy's checks and balances have all failed, that the breakdown is systemic, and that severe instability could be just around the corner. So now is the time for real action, and that starts with asking questions. It doesn't take much to connect the dots, Doe concludes. From start to finish, inception to global media distribution, the next revolution will be digitized. Or perhaps it has already begun.

The founders of Mosak Fonseca were borderline retired when the entire contents of their four decade old law firm spilled into public view. Jurgen Mosak, then sixty-eight, had started a new family with his third wife and was planning to funnel the tens of millions he had earned throughout his career into real estate developments.

Sixty-three-year-old Ramon Fonseca had planned to return to his literary pursuits for which he had already found acclaim. In the 90s, he had won top prizes in Panama for novels that surprisingly revolved around corrupt officials and backroom deals. Fonseca also dabbled in politics. In 2009, he became an advisor to Panamanian president Riccardo Martinelli, and he remained in that role under Martinelli's successor, Juan Carlos Farela.

Fonseca once told a colleague that he entered politics to help clean up Panama's human rights record, which was hilarious in retrospect, given the clientele his law firm had quietly served for decades.

The partner's retirement plans were abruptly derailed by the Panama Papers, instead of developing properties and writing books. Mosak and Von Seca retained an American crisis management firm and set out on a media tour in an attempt to salvage the reputation of their suddenly infamous enterprise.

Are you proud of the business that you've run here? I am very proud of it. Why? Because it's a business that contributes to the international financial community in matters where people want privacy and I think uh one needs to confirm uh one needs to know that privacy is a human right. It is a human right for every person, no matter what they do. In press releases and interviews, the lawyers tried to shrink their culpability down to a rounding error.

Any criminal activity exposed by the Panama Papers, they argued, accounted for less than one percent of the roughly quarter million companies Mosak Fonseca had incorporated over the years. And besides, they insisted. Setting up the companies was all they did. Paperwork in, paperwork out. What clients chose to do afterward was not the firm's responsibility.

To make the point stick, Ramon Fonseca offered a tried and true analogy. We're a knife factory, he said. We sell knives. We are not responsible if the knife is used in a murder. Nosotros somos una fábrica de cuchillos, que vendemos cuchillos. Y el cuchillo es usado para un asesinato. Nosotros no somos, o sea, no sé si me explico, somos responsables de que el cuchillo haya sido usado para ese asesinato.

If Mosak Fonseca was to be blamed for every dirty dollar circulating offshore, the firm argued, then so should virtually every other law practice performing the same work. In fact, they accurately noted, the world's largest incorporators were in the United States and United Kingdom. We incorporate twenty thousand offshore companies a year, the Panamadian firm said, while they incorporate more than two hundred fifty thousand. That argument helps explain something else you may have noticed.

There aren't many Americans named in the Panama Papers. At least not as many as you would expect. It's not because Americans are unusually law-abiding. It's because many of them never needed Mosak von Seca in the first place. The United States already offers its own secrecy jurisdictions Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming, and South Dakota. Mosak and Fonseca argued that their law firm and the entire country of Panama were being unfairly targeted for something that was not unique to them.

In their opinion, the real wrongdoing wasn't the offshore machinery they had spent decades operating, it was the leak itself. If there were victims in this story, they implied, it was them, the firm whose data had been stolen and whose reputation had been dragged through the mud for simply conducting business as usual. We're amazed that nobody has said, hey, a crime has been committed here.

We have already lodged a complaint, and there is a government institution looking at the issue and helping us. But there's nothing concrete. We have a theory, but no proof. We've just started investigating the issue. I'm a writer. I'm also a novelist. And I also like to investigate. I feel disappointed by modern investigative journalism. I'm very disappointed. It's not the investigative journalism that I read in my time, which was more impartial.

Speculation about the whistleblower's identity began the moment the leak went public. Many assumed it had to be an insider, the Mosac Von Sega employee with a conscience or grudge, but the firm denied it outright. Others floated the idea of a disgruntled client. A few went further, proposing soap opera theories involving scorned lovers. None of it was ever substantiated.

What was substantiated came from a forensic IT expert at Panama's public prosecutor's office. The breach, they concluded, was the work of a third party who gained unauthorized access through a web of unpatched servers. Mosak Fonseca had failed to segregate its email and public web servers from its internal client database. Access to one system effectively meant access to everything.

Reportedly, the door was pried open using something as banal as an outdated WordPress plugin on the firm's public-facing website, but there were so many security failures stacked on top of each other that investigators struggled to pinpoint a single point of entry. Which helps explain the most absurd detail of all. Mosak Fonseca never fixed the breach.

As the Panama Papers detonated around the world, the firm's internal correspondence continued to pour out emails, memos, real time reactions, quietly siphoned off by John Doe, The result was not just a leak of new documents, but a front row seat, to a law firm collapsing in on itself as it furiously worked to retroactively satisfy due diligence and compliance requirements for angry clients who didn't want their identities revealed.

Many of those clients barely missed a beat, simply shifting their business to other law firms. Meanwhile, Mosak Fonseca scrambled to survive, slashing fees, rebranding some of its franchises, and even offering clients free name changes for their shell companies. It didn't work. By November 2016, nine of the firm's offices around the world had closed, and hundreds of Mosak Von Seca employees were laid off.

That same month, the British Virgin Islands fined the firm$440,000 for a cascade of compliance failures, including the revelation that it knew the beneficial owners of fewer than 30% of the firm. of the more than one hundred shell companies that had registered in the territory. As for criminal charges, a Panamanian prosecutor did open an investigation into Mosak Von Seca, even carrying out a search of the firm's offices, but the effort went nowhere.

Investigators lacked the equipment, technical capacity, and subject matter expertise needed to untangle the trove of data. And in any case, Panama's government showed little enthusiasm for a prosecution, initially portraying Mosak von Seca as a sympathetic casualty at the center of a broader, unfair attack on the country itself. However, that posture would not last. Outrage across Latin America at one of the world's greatest corruption scandals.

Brazilian construction giant Oderbrecht owned up to paying nearly$800 million in bribes for fat public works contracts. The US Justice Department slapped it with a record$3.5 billion fine last December. But prosecutors say there's even more to uncover. It's possible that these investigations are expect these investigations to reveal new corruption schemes. In parallel to those illegal acts that were allegedly committed by Brazilian companies. mainly construction firms in foreign countries.

On february eleventh, twenty seventeen, Jurgen Mosak and Ramon Fonseca were arrested in Panama as prosecutors turned their attention to the firm's alleged role in the Operation Car Washington. Known in Portuguese as Lava Jato. The sprawling investigation, launched in 2014, had already become Brazil's largest ever corruption scandal, implicating hundreds of executives, politicians, and public officials. And a bribery scheme that moved billions of dollars through state-owned oil giant Petrobras.

The Panama Papers had unveiled the financial dimension to what prosecutors were already uncovering. Documents showed that Oderbrecht and individuals tied to the firm used offshore shell companies created or administered by Mosak von Seiko. To move money, obscure ownership, and in some cases disguise bribes that later became central evidence in the Lava Giato cases. Like usual, Mosac Fonseca insisted that merely sold companies to intermediaries without knowing the nature of their business.

But prosecutors developed a theory that the firm operated as a quote, criminal organization, and worked with a local bank to help launder the illicit funds. Before he was taken into custody, Ramon Fonseca staged an impromptu press conference, lashing out at what he described as an escalating campaign of persecution. against himself and his partner.

We have kept quiet, but this Odebrecht case is the limit, he said. Fonseca blamed nearly everyone but himself. He claimed HSBC Bank had dragged him into serious trouble, and hinted at corruption within the administration of Panamanian President Juan Carlos Farela for whom Fonseca had once served as an advisor. May I be struck down by lightning if I'm lying, he declared. They are looking for a scapegoat.

Both Fonseca and Jurgen Mosak were denied bail, after prosecutors deemed them flight risk, leaving them jailed for more than two months. If this were Spain in the Dark Ages, they would have us burning at the stake, Mosak scribbled in a notebook from his cell. The pair were ultimately acquitted of the money laundering charges in 2022, but by then the firm said the damage was irreversible.

In a march twenty eighteen statement announcing its permanent closure, Mosak Fonseca blamed what it called the financial circus and the unusual actions by certain Panamanian authorities for the The legal saga, however, was not over. In 2020, Panamanian authorities filed money laundering charges against Mosak, Fonseca, and twenty-seven other employees and alleged conspirators, this time tied directly to the Panama Papers' files.

After four years of delays, the trial finally began in April twenty twenty four. Two months later, every defendant was acquitted, with the court citing insufficient evidence and problems with the chain of custody. The defence celebrated the verdict, but it was a bittersweet victory.

Ramon Fonseca had died just a month earlier from complications of pneumonia. His daughter Raquel told a Spanish news agency that all of this political persecution, all of the injustices, had taken a severe toll on her 71-year-old father's health. At the time of his death, Fonseca was reportedly working on a new novel about an investigative journalist who was, quote, honest and looking for the truth without agendas. The working title asked, Is privacy a lost human right?

changes in law in something like fifty two countries. I mean the story was unprecedented. And I don't think we'll probably ever see a story like this. I mean it is kinda like Watergate all over again. Um and I think it'll be talked about for the next twenty or thirty years. Well certainly the biggest story of the decade.

Jared Ryle, Bastion Obermeyer, Frederick Obermeyer, and all the other journalists who joined the ICIJ to report on the Panama Papers were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in twenty seventeen The scale and public impact of the leak were unprecedented.

It triggered nearly seven thousand investigations of individuals and companies across almost one hundred countries, and more than twenty governments later reported recovering billions of dollars in unpaid taxes and penalties from those named in the files. After that, it was hard to imagine another investigation matching its reach. Unless, of course, vast troves of offshore data were to fall into journalist hands again.

The financial secrets of the world's elite have been revealed in a huge leak of documents obtained by the German newspaper Sir Deutsche Zeitung. The so-called Paradise Papers show that many global figures, including Britain's Queen Elizabeth, have invested private money in offshore funds in Caribbean tax havens. The documents also show substantial payments made from a firm co-owned by Vladimir Putin's. And again.

This is called the the Panama Papers on steroids. They're calling it the Pandora Papers. It includes I think up to thirty five uh now uh present and former world leaders who are hiding money in foreign jurisdictions, the the presidents of uh of Ukraine and uh uh you know, a a number of presidents and prime ministers, the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, for example.

All of the data from the Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Pandora Papers, and subsequent and future offshore leaks has been consolidated into a vast Searchable public database maintained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, hundreds of thousands of individuals and companies are named there, every shell, trust, and intermediary laid bare. But one entity has remained a mystery.

John Doe. The source stayed silent for years, resurfacing only once, six years after the initial leak, to grant an interview in july twenty twenty two, to Bastion Obermeyer and Frederick Obermeyer, by then working at Der Spiegel, I am astounded with the outcome of the Panama Papers though said. Sadly, it is still not enough. I never thought that releasing one law firm's data would solve global corruption full stop, let alone change human nature.

Politicians must act, Doe urged, before offering a sensible solution We need publicly accessible corporate registries in every jurisdiction, from the British Virgin Islands to Anguilla, to the Seychelles, to Labuan, to Delaware. Now. And if you hear resistance, that sound you hear is the sound of a politician who must be sacked. Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen, with original music by Trevor Howard, aka deformer, aka Los Angeles' third sexiest man.

It's pretty impressive. For more information about swindled you can visit swindled podcast dot com And follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok at Swindled Podcast, or you can send us a postcard at PO Box two zero four five Austin, Texas seventy seven six eight. But please no packages, we do not trust you. Swindled is a completely independent production.

Which means no network, no investors, no bosses, no shadowy moneymen, no luxury property in London. And we plan to keep it that way, but we need your support. Become a valued listener on Patreon, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify at valuedlistener.com.

For as little as five bucks a month, you will receive early access to new episodes and exclusive access to bonus episodes that you can't find anywhere else, and everything is one hundred percent commercial free. Become a valued listener at valuedlistener.com. Or, if you want to support the show and need something to wear to Panama, consider buying something you don't need at Swindle Podcast.com slash shop. There are t-shirts, patches, hats, hoodies, posters, coffee mugs, and more.

Swindled Podcast.com/slash shop. And remember to use coupon code CAPITILISLIM to receive 10% off your order. If you don't want anything in return for your support, you can always simply donate using the form on the homepage. That's it. Thanks for listening. Hi. This is Sandy from Mattery. Hello, our name is Lil and Dexter from San Diego. California. Hello, my name is Elizabeth from Chicago and I'm a concerned citizen concern. Citizen Citizen and Value Liz.

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