# Panama Papers

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Published: 2026-10-25T18:23:27.581Z

Updated: 2026-10-25T18:23:27.581Z

The Panama Papers (Spanish: Papeles de Panamá) are 11.5 million leaked documents (2.6 terabytes of data) published from April 3, 2016. The papers detail financial and attorney–client information for more than 214,488 offshore entities. These documents, some dating back to the 1970s, were created by, and taken from, the former Panamanian offshore law firm and corporate service provider Mo

## Key facts

## Overview

The Panama Papers (Spanish: Papeles de Panamá) are 11.5 million leaked documents (2.6 terabytes of data) published from April 3, 2016. The papers detail financial and attorney–client information for more than 214,488 offshore entities. These documents, some dating back to the 1970s, were created by, and taken from, the former Panamanian offshore law firm and corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca, and compiled with similar leaks into a searchable database. The documents contain personal financial information about wealthy individuals and public officials previously private. Their publication made it possible to prosecute Jan Marsalek, a person of interest to a number of European governments and revealed his links with Russian intelligence, and international financial fraudster Harald Joachim von der Goltz. While offshore business entities are legal, reporters found that some of the Mossack Fonseca shell corporations were used for illegal purposes, including fraud, tax evasion, and evading international sanctions. "John Doe", the whistleblower who leaked the documents to journalist Bastian Obermayer from the German national newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), remains anonymous, apparently even to the journalists who worked on the investigation. "My life is in danger", the whistleblower told them. In a document (released on May 6, 2016), Doe cited income inequality as the reason for the action and said the documents were leaked "simply because I understood enough about their contents to realize the scale of the injustices they described". Doe stated that he had never worked for any government or intelligence agency and expressed willingness to help prosecutors if granted immunity from prosecution. After SZ verified that the statement did in fact come from the source for the Panama Papers, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) posted the full document on its website. SZ asked the ICIJ for help because of the data involved. Journalists from 107 media organizations in 80 countries analyzed documents detailing the operations of the law firm. After more than a year of analysis, the first news stories were published on April 3, 2016, along with 150 of the documents themselves. The project represents an important milestone in the use of data journalism software tools and mobile collaboration. The documents were dubbed the Panama Papers because of the country they were leaked from. Still, the Panamanian government, as well as other entities in Panama and elsewhere, expressed strong objections to the name over concerns that it would tarnish the government's and country's image worldwide. Some media outlets covering the story have used the name "Mossack Fonseca papers". In June 2024, a judge in Panama acquitted all former Mossack Fonseca employees, including the two founders, due to insufficient evidence and problems with the chain of custody of evidence.

## Disclosures

In addition to the much-covered business dealings of British prime minister David Cameron and Icelandic prime minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, the leaked documents also contain identity information about the shareholders and directors of 214,000 shell companies set up by Mossack Fonseca, as well as some of their financial transactions. Although it is generally not against the law to own an offshore shell company, reporters found that some of the shell corporations were used for illegal purposes, including fraud, tax evasion, and evading international sanctions. The journalists on the investigative team found business transactions by many important figures in world politics, sports, and art. While many of the transactions were legal, since the data is incomplete, questions remain in many other cases; still others seem to clearly indicate ethical if not legal impropriety. Some disclosures – tax avoidance in very poor countries by very wealthy entities and individuals for example – led to questions on moral grounds. For example, the shell company Octea is registered to Beny Steinmetz and owes more than US$700,000 in property taxes to the city of Koidu in Sierra Leone, and is $150 million in debt, even though its exports were more than twice that in an average month in the 2012–2015 period. Steinmetz himself has a personal worth of $6 billion. Other offshore shell company transactions described in the documents seem to have broken exchange laws, violated trade sanctions or stemmed from political corruption, according to ICIJ reporters. For example:

Uruguay has arrested five people and charged them with money laundering through Mossack Fonseca shell companies for a Mexican drug cartel. Ouestaf, an ICIJ partner in the investigation, reported that it had discovered new evidence that Karim Wade received payments from DP World (DP). He and a long-time friend were convicted of this in a trial that the United Nations and Amnesty International said was unfair and violated the defendants' rights. The Ouestaf article does not address the conduct of the trial, but does say that Ouestaf journalists found Mossack Fonseca documents showing payments to Wade via a DP subsidiary and a shell company registered to the friend. Swiss lawyer Dieter Neupert has been accused of mishandling client funds and helping both oligarchs and the Qatari royal family to hide money. Named in the leak were 12 extant or former world leaders; 128 other public officials and politicians; and hundreds of celebrities, businessmen, and other wealthy individuals from over 200 countries. One notable case involved former Iceland prime minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, who was found to possess a secret offshore account in a shell company called Wintris Inc., along with his wife. When Gunnlaugsson was elected in 2013, he had promised to be tougher on Iceland's foreign creditors. However, as revealed by the Panama Papers, Wintris Inc., which he and his wife owned a stake in, was one of these creditors. This conflict of interest ultimately led to his resignation in 2016.

## Tax haven

Individuals and entities may open offshore accounts for any number of reasons, some of which are legal. A Canadian lawyer based in Dubai noted, for example, that businesses might wish to avoid falling under Islamic inheritance jurisprudence if an owner dies. Businesses in some countries may wish to hold some of their funds in dollars also, said a Brazilian lawyer. Estate planning is another example of legal tax avoidance. American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick had an estimated personal worth of $20 million when he died in 1999, much of it invested in an 18th-century English manor he bought in 1978. He lived in that manor for the rest of his life, filming scenes from The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut there as well. Three holding companies set up by Mossack Fonseca now own the property, and are in turn held by trusts set up for his children and grandchildren. Since Kubrick was an American living in Britain, without the trust his estate would have had to pay transfer taxes to both governments and possibly have been forced to sell the property to obtain the liquid assets to pay them. Kubrick is buried on the grounds along with one of his daughters, and the rest of his family still lives there. Other uses are more ambiguous. Chinese companies may incorporate offshore in order to raise foreign capital, normally against the law in China. In some of the world's hereditary dictatorships, the law may be on the side of the elite who use offshore companies to award oil contracts to themselves, or gold concessions to their children, however such dealings are sometimes prosecuted under international law. While no standard official definition exists, The Economist and the International Monetary Fund describe an offshore financial center, or tax haven, as a jurisdiction whose banking infrastructure primarily provides services to people or businesses who do not live there, requires little or no disclosure of information when doing business, and offers low taxes. "The most obvious use of offshore financial centers is to avoid taxes", The Economist added. Oxfam blamed tax havens in its 2016 annual report on income inequality for much of the widening gap between rich and poor. "Tax havens are at the core of a global system that allows large corporations and wealthy individuals to avoid paying their fair share," said Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, "depriving governments, rich and poor, of the resources they need to provide vital public services and tackle rising inequality". International Monetary Fund (IMF) researchers estimated in July 2015 that profit shifting by multinational companies costs developing countries around US$213 billion a year, almost two percent of their national income. Real estate in London, where housing prices increased 50% from 2007 to 2016, also is frequently purchased by overseas investors. Donald Toon, then head of Britain's National Crime Agency, said in 2015 that "the London property market has been skewed by laundered money. Prices are being artificially driven up by overseas criminals who want to sequester their assets here in the UK". Three-quarters of Londoners under 35 cannot afford to buy a home. Andy Yan, an urban planning researcher and adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia, studied real estate sales in Vancouver—also thought to be affected by foreign purchasers—found that 18% of the transactions in Vancouver's most expensive neighborhoods were cash purchases, and 66% of the owners appeared to be Chinese nationals or recent arrivals from China. Calls for more data on foreign investors have been rejected by the provincial government. Chinese nationals accounted for 70% of 2014 Vancouver home sales for more than CA$3 million. On June 24, 2016, China CITIC Bank Corp filed suit in Canada against a Chinese citizen who borrowed CN¥50 million for his lumber business in China, but then withdrew roughly CA$7.5 million from the line of credit and left the country. He bought three houses in Vancouver and Surrey, British Columbia together valued at CA$7.3 million during a three-month period in June 2014.

## International banking

"This issue will surely be raised at the G20 summit," predicted Tomasz Kozlowski, Ambassador of the European Union (EU) to India. "We need to strengthen international cooperation for the exchange of tax information between tax authorities". Panama, Vanuatu and Lebanon may find themselves on a list of uncooperative tax havens that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) re-activated in July 2016 at the request of G20 nations, warned Le Monde, a French newspaper that participated in the investigation. Those three countries followed none of the OECD's three broad guidelines for international banking cooperation:

information exchange on request a signed multilateral agreement on information standards a commitment to implement automated information exchange in 2017 or 2018 The OECD, the G20, or the European Union could also institute another list of countries that are inadequate in more than one area. Countries meeting none of these criteria, such as Panama, Vanuatu and Lebanon, would go on the blacklist. Countries that meet only one criterion would go on the greylist. In April 2016, if this greylist had been in place it would have included nine countries: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahrain, Brunei, Dominica, Liberia, Nauru, Samoa, Tobago and the United Arab Emirates.

## Illegal activities

While offshore business entities are not illegal in the jurisdictions where they are registered, and often not illegal at all, reporters found that some Mossack Fonseca shell corporations seem to have been used for illegal purposes including fraud, kleptocracy, tax evasion and evading international sanctions. Offshore companies are legal, said Panamanian lawyer and former comptroller of the republic Alvin Weeden; illegality arises when they are used for money laundering, arms smuggling, terrorism, or tax evasion. On October 22, 2016, during a state visit to Germany, Varela told journalist Jenny Pérez, of Deutsche Welle that there had been "progress" in transparency and many agreements to exchange tax information, and that tax evasion was a global problem. Asked about his ties with Ramón Fonseca Mora, managing partner of the firm Mossack Fonseca, he acknowledged that he is a friend. In October 2020, German authorities issued an international arrest warrant for the two founders of the law firm at the core of the tax evasion scandal exposed by the Panama Papers. Cologne prosecutors sought German-born Jürgen Mossack and Panamanian Ramón Fonseca on charges of accessory to tax evasion and forming a criminal organization. Igor Angelini, head of Europol's Financial Intelligence Group, said that shell companies "play an important role in large-scale money laundering activities" and that they are often a means to "transfer bribe money". Tax Justice Network concluded in a 2012 report that "designing commercial tax abuse schemes and turning a blind eye upon suspicious transactions have become an inherent part of the work of bankers and accountants". Money laundering affects the first world as well, since a favored shell company investment is real estate in Europe and North America. London, Miami, New York, Paris, Vancouver and San Francisco have all been affected. The practice of parking assets in luxury real estate has been frequently cited as fueling rocketing housing prices in Miami, where the Miami Association of Realtors said that cash sales accounted for 90% of new home sales in 2015. "There is a huge amount of dirty money flowing into Miami that's disguised as investment," according to former congressional investigator Jack Blum. In Miami, 76% of condo owners pay cash (as opposed to using a mortgage), a practice considered a red flag for money-laundering, as of 2016. Analysis from Redfin in 2022 found that 31.9% of houses were purchased with cash across the 39 largest metropolitan areas in the US. This is higher than the sub 25% cash purchase rate as seen during the purchase of the Panama papers. Leaked documents also indicate that the firm would also backdate documents on request and, based on a 2007 exchange of emails in the leaked documents, it did so routinely enough to establish a price structure: $8.75 per month in the past. In 2008, Mossack Fonseca hired a 90-year-old British man to pretend to be the owner of the offshore company of Marianna Olszewski, a US businesswoman, "a blatant breach of anti–money laundering rules" according to the BBC.

## Recovered money

In April 2019, the ICIJ and European newspapers reported that the global tally of recovered sums from litigation, fines and back taxes exceeded $1.2 billion. Great Britain recovered the largest amount ($253 million), followed by Denmark ($237 million), Germany ($183 million), Spain ($164 million), France ($136 million) and Australia ($93 million). Colombia recovered $89 million, the highest amount for any South or Central American country. As of August 2019, investigations are ongoing in Austria, Canada and Switzerland, and many other countries are conducting inspections of companies and private individuals revealed in the report.

## Newsroom logistics

The ICIJ helped organize the research and document review once Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) realized the scale of the work required to validate the authenticity of 2.6 terabytes of leaked data. The group enlisted reporters and resources from a variety of outlets including The Guardian, BBC, Le Monde, SonntagsZeitung, Falter, La Nación, German broadcasters NDR and WDR, and Austrian broadcaster ORF. Ultimately, "reporters at 100 news media outlets working in 25 languages had used the documents" to investigate individuals and organizations associated with Mossack Fonseca. Operations security factored in a number of project management considerations. Saying "my life is in danger," one anonymous "John Doe" insisted that reporters communicate over encrypted channels only and agreed that they would never meet face-to-face. SZ also had concerns about security, not only for their source, the leaked documents, and their data, but also for the safety of some of their partners in the investigation living under corrupt regimes who might not want their money-handling practices made public. They stored the data in a room with limited physical access on air-gapped computers that were never connected to the Internet. The Guardian also limited access to its journalists' project work area. To make it even harder to sabotage the computers or steal their drives, SZ journalists made them more tamper-evident by painting the screws holding the drives in place with glitter nail polish. Reporters sorted the documents into a huge file structure containing a folder for each shell company, which held the associated emails, contracts, transcripts, and scanned documents Mossack Fonseca had generated while doing business with the company or administering it on a client's behalf. Some 4.8 million leaked files were emails, 3 million were database entries, 2.2 million PDFs, 1.2 million images, 320,000 text files, and 2242 files in other formats. Journalists indexed the documents using open software packages Apache Solr and Apache Tika, and accessed them by means of a custom interface built on top of Blacklight. Süddeutsche Zeitung reporters also used Nuix for this, which is proprietary software donated by an Australian company also named Nuix. Using Nuix, Süddeutsche Zeitung reporters performed optical character recognition (OCR) processing on the millions of scanned documents, converting the data they contained to searchable and machine-readable text. Most project reporters then used Neo4J and Linkurious to extract individual and corporate names from the documents for analysis, but some who had access to Nuix used it for this as well. Reporters cross-referenced the compiled lists of people against the processed documents, then analyzed the information, trying to connect people, roles, monetary flow, and structure legality. US banking and SEC expert David P. Weber assisted journalists in reviewing information from the Panama Papers. Additional stories were released based on this data, and the full list of companies was released in early May 2016. The ICIJ later announced the release on May 9, 2016, of a searchable database containing information on over 200,000 offshore entities implicated in the Panama Papers investigation and more than 100,000 additional companies implicated in the 2013 Offshore Leaks investigation. Mossack Fonseca asked the ICIJ not to publish the leaked documents from its database. "We have sent a cease and desist letter," the company said in a statement. The sheer quantity of leaked data greatly exceeds the WikiLeaks Cablegate leak in 2010 (1.7 GB), Offshore Leaks in 2013 (260 GB), the 2014 Lux Leaks (4 GB), and the 3.3 GB Swiss Leaks of 2015. For comparison, the 2.6 TB of the Panama Papers equals approximately 2,660 GB.

## Data security

Mossack Fonseca notified its clients on April 1, 2016, that it had sustained an email hack. Mossack Fonseca also told news sources that the company had been hacked and always operated within the law. Data security experts noted, however, that the company had not been encrypting its emails and furthermore seemed to have been running a three-year-old version of Drupal with several known vulnerabilities. According to James Sanders of TechRepublic, Drupal ran on the Apache 2.2.15 version from March 6, 2010, the Oracle fork of Apache, which by default allows users to view directory structure. The network architecture was also inherently insecure; the email and web servers were not segmented from the client database in any way. Some reports also suggest that some parts of the site may have been running WordPress with an out-of-date version of Slider Revolution, a plugin whose previously announced vulnerabilities are well-documented. A grey hat hacker named 1×0123 announced on April 12 that Mossack Fonseca's content management system had not been secured from SQL injection, a well-known database attack vector, and that he had been able to access the customer database because of this. Computer security expert Chris Kubecka announced on May 24, 2016, that the Mossack Fonseca client login portal was running four different government-grade remote access trojans (RATs). Kubecka confirmed there were still numerous critical vulnerabilities, too many open ports in their infrastructure and internet access to their archive server due to weak security. Kubecka explained how each data security issue was discovered in detail in a book titled Down the Rabbit Hole: An OSINT Journey.

## Leak and leak journalism

Gerard Ryle, director of the ICIJ, called the leak "probably the biggest blow the offshore world has ever taken because of the extent of the documents". Edward Snowden described the release in a Twitter message as the "biggest leak in the history of data journalism". The ICIJ also said that the leak was "likely to be one of the most explosive \[leaks of inside information in history\] in the nature of its revelations". "This is a unique opportunity to test the effectiveness of leaktivism", said Micah White, co-founder of Occupy, "... the Panama Papers are being dissected via an unprecedented collaboration between hundreds of highly credible international journalists who have been working secretly for a year. This is the global professionalization of leaktivism. The days of WikiLeaks amateurism are over." WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic investigative journalist who worked on Cablegate in 2010, said withholding some documents for a time does maximise the leak's impact, but called for full online publication of the Panama Papers eventually. A tweet from WikiLeaks criticized the decision of the ICIJ not to release everything for ethical reasons: "If you censor more than 99% of the documents you are engaged in 1% journalism by definition." The whistleblower reported that the murder of journalists Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017 and Ján Kuciak in 2018 due to their investigations of the Panama Papers had deeply affected him and called upon the European Union to deliver justice.

## People named

Reports from April 3 note the law firm's many connections to high-ranking political figures and their relatives, as well as celebrities and business figures. Among other things, the leaked documents illustrate how wealthy individuals, including public officials, can keep personal financial information private. Initial reports identified five then-heads of state or government leaders from Argentina, Iceland, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates as well as government officials, close relatives, and close associates of various heads of government of more than forty other countries. Names of then-current national leaders in the documents include President Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, and the Prime Minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson. Former heads of state mentioned in the papers include:

Argentinian president Mauricio Macri who was president from December 2015 to December 2019. Moreover, the moral problem, the opposers claimed illegality because he never put this in his patrimonial declarations. For one of the official sources of Panama papers: "Macri's official spokesman Ivan Pavlovsky said that the Argentine president didn't list Fleg Trading Ltd. as an asset because he had no capital participation in the company. The company, used to participate in interests in Brazil, was related to the family business group. "This is why Mauricio Macri was occasionally its director," he said, reiterating that Macri was not a shareholder." Sudanese president Ahmed al-Mirghani, who was president from 1986–1989 and died in 2008. Former Emir of Qatar Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani owned Afrodille S.A., which had a bank account in Luxembourg and shares in two South African companies. Al Thani also held a majority of the shares in Rienne S.A. and Yalis S.A., holding a term deposit with the Bank of China in Luxembourg. A relative owned 25 percent of these: Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, Qatar's former prime minister and foreign minister. Former prime ministers:

Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili of Georgia Pavlo Lazarenko of Ukraine Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a former vice president of Iraq, owned property through Mossack Fonseca shell companies registered in Panama and the British Virgin Islands, for security reasons following an assassination attempt, according to his spokesperson, who added that any income from the properties was reported and taxes paid "promptly and on time". Ion Sturza of Moldova. Ali Abu al-Ragheb of Jordan. The leaked files identified 61 family members and associates of prime ministers, presidents and kings, including:

the brother-in-law of China's paramount leader Xi Jinping the son of former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak children of former Prime Minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif children of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev Clive Khulubuse Zuma, the nephew of former South African President Jacob Zuma Nurali Aliyev, the grandson of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev Mounir Majidi, the personal secretary of Moroccan King Mohammed VI Kojo Annan, the son of former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan Mark Thatcher, the son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher Juan Armando Hinojosa, the "favourite contractor" of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. Spanish Royal Family: Infanta Pilar, Duchess of Badajoz and her son Bruno Gómez-Acebes, Iñaki Urdangarín, Amalio de Marichalar, and people close to the family like the mistress of former King Juan Carlos I, Corinna Larsen. Other clients included less senior government officials and their close relatives and associates, from over forty countries. Over £10 million of cash from the sale of the gold stolen in the 1983 Brink's-Mat robbery was laundered, first unwittingly and later with the complicity of Mossack Fonseca, through a Panamanian company, Feberion Inc. The company was set up on behalf of an unnamed client twelve months after the robbery. The Brinks money was put through Feberion and other front companies, through banks in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Jersey, and the Isle of Man. It issued bearer shares only. Two nominee directors from Sark were appointed to Feberion by Jersey-based offshore specialist Centre Services. The offshore firms recycled the funds through land and property transactions in the United Kingdom. Although the Metropolitan Police Service raided the offices of Centre Services in late 1986 in cooperation with Jersey authorities, and seized papers and two Feberion bearer shares, it wasn't until 1995 that Brink's-Mat's solicitors were finally able to take control of Feberion and the assets. Actor Jackie Chan is mentioned in the leaked documents as a shareholder in six companies based in the British Virgin Islands.

## Client services

Mossack Fonseca is one of the biggest in its field and the biggest financial institutions refer customers to it. Its services to clients include incorporating and operating shell companies in friendly jurisdictions on their behalf. They can include creating "complex shell company structures" that, while legal, also allow the firm's clients "to operate behind an often impenetrable wall of secrecy". The leaked papers detail some of their intricate, multilevel, and multinational corporate structures. Mossack Fonseca has acted with global consultancy partners like Emirates Asset Management Ltd, Ryan Mohanlal Ltd, Sun Hedge Invest and Blue Capital Ltd on behalf of more than 300,000 companies, most of them registered in the British Overseas Territories.

## Sanctioned clients

Many firms and individuals take advantage of the anonymity of offshore shell companies to circumvent international sanctions. More than 30 Mossack Fonseca clients were at some point in time blacklisted by the US Treasury Department, including businesses linked to senior figures in Russia, Syria and North Korea. Three Mossack Fonseca companies started for clients of Helene Mathieu Legal Consultants were later sanctioned by the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Pangates International Corporation was accused in July 2014 of supplying the government of Syria with "a large amount of specialty petroleum products" with "limited civilian application in Syria". The other two, Maxima Middle East Trading and Morgan Additives Manufacturing Co, and their owners Wael Abdulkarim and Ahmad Barqawi, were said to have "engaged in deceptive measures" to supply oil products to Syria. Mossack Fonseca also ran six businesses for Rami Makhlouf, cousin of the former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, despite US sanctions against him. Internal Mossack Fonseca documents show that in 2011 Mossack Fonseca rejected a recommendation by their own compliance team to sever ties to Mr. Makhlouf. They agreed to do so only months later. The firm has said it never knowingly allowed anyone connected with rogue regimes to use its companies. Frederik Obermaier, co-author of the Panama Papers story and an investigative reporter at the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, told Democracy Now: "Mossack Fonseca realised that Makhlouf was the cousin, and they realised that he was sanctioned, and they realised that he's allegedly one of the financiers of the Syrian regime. And they said, 'Oh, there is this bank who still does business with him, so we should still keep with him, as well'." HSBC also appeared to reassure Mossack Fonseca not only that it was "comfortable" with Makhlouf as a client but suggested there could be a rapprochement with the Assad family by the US. Makhlouf is already known to be a long-standing client of HSBC's Swiss private bank, holding at least $15 million with it in multiple accounts in 2006. The Panamanian files also show HSBC provided financial services to a Makhlouf company called Drex Technologies, which HSBC said was a company of "good standing". DCB Finance, a Virgin Islands-based shell company founded by North Korean banker Kim Chol-sam and British banker Nigel Cowie, also ignored international sanctions and continued to do business with North Korea with the help of the Panamanian firm. The US Treasury Department in 2013 called DCB Finance a front company for Daedong Credit Bank and announced sanctions against both companies for providing banking services to North Korean arms dealer Korea Mining and Development Trading Corporation, attempting to evade sanctions against that country, and helping to sell arms and expand North Korea's nuclear weapons programme. Cowie said the holding company was used for legitimate business and he was not aware of illicit transactions. Mossack Fonseca, required by international banking standards to avoid money laundering or fraudster clients, is, like all banks, supposed to be particularly alert for signs of corruption with politically exposed persons (PEP), in other words, clients who either are or have close ties to government officials. However they somehow failed to turn up any red flags concerning Tareq Abbas even though he shares a family name with the president of Palestine, and sat on the board of directors of a company with four fellow directors the firm did deem PEP because of their ties to Palestinian politics. Yet Mossack Fonseca actually did and documented due diligence research, including a Google search.

## Sources

- Panama Papers · Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=50034356

Source: Wikipedia contributors — https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=50034356&oldid=1380989680

Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Adaptation notice: Reformatted for XPay; the source may be abridged, restructured or translated. Consult the cited revision for the original.