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.
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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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