The Police officers search headquarters to ‘establish the use of illicit activities’ including money laundering and financing terrorism
The crime prosecutors raided the offices of the Mossack Fonseca law firm on Tuesday looking for evidence of money laundering and financing terrorism following a leak of documents about tax havens it set up for wealthy international clients.
The dozen police officers set up a perimeter around the offices while prosecutors searched inside for documents. A attorney general’s office said in a statement that the objective of the raid was (to obtain documentation linked to the information published in news articles that establish the use of the firm in illicit activities).
The Mossack Fonseca has denied, (search came a day after intellectual property prosecutors visited Mossack Fonseca to follow up on the firm’s allegations that a computer hack led to the leak of millions of documents about tax havens). So finally the real criminals are being investigated, he said in a message to the AP on Monday.
But Fonseca has maintained that the only crime which can be taken from the leak was the computer hack itself. said he suspects the hack originated outside Panama, possibly in Europe, but has not given any details. So the law firm is one of the most important in the world for creating overseas front companies.
Important thing in this case Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela has defended the country’s financial sector, which is considered of strategic importance for the economy. But Varela has also promised the international community that he is willing to make reforms to make the sector more transparent. So the government announced that Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001, would be one member of an international panel formed to review Panama’s legal and financial practices and recommend improvements.
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