India opens new Panama Papers probe

The Indian Ministry of Finance of India announced an “immediate” investigation of new Panama Papers revelations  and said that an examination of the texts revealed in 2016 has revealed about 144 million euros of “secret investments abroad” “

“The publication today ( June 21) in the media of the ‘Panama Papers’ will be investigated immediately by government agencies” under the command of a working group made up of several public agencies, the ministry said in a statement.

The Government will study the new leakage published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) “within a reasonable period of time,” the statement said.

The ministry said it has so far investigated 74 taxpayers linked to the first batch of documents released in March 2016, detecting investments abroad without declaring worth about 11,400 million rupees (about 144 million euros).

According to the statement, the Indian Government has filed criminal complaints in 16 cases.

According to the local newspaper Indian Express, a collaborator with the ICIJ, at least 12,000 of the almost 1.2 million new documents published Thursday  are linked to Indian citizens.

The Panama Papers scandal of 2016 covers more than 11.5 million documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, specialized in capital management in tax havens.

The publication of the papers hit  personalities of like  Argentine president, Mauricio Macri; the former British Prime Minister David Cameron, the footballer Lionel Messi, members of the inner circle of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and  the then Prime Minister of Iceland, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, who had to resign because of the scandal.