Closed Panama Papersfirm claims actions were legal

Mossack & Fonseca,(M&F) the Panama law firm at the center of the Panama Papers scandal that rocked financial centers around the world has again defended the legality of its activities.

A nnew stack of documents, published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), revealed that the firm did not know 75% of the final beneficiaries of the corporations they created.

In a statement that came to media outlets, the no longer active firm said that the publications only confirm that most of the clients were regulated intermediaries, such as banks, fiduciaries, lawyers, accountants, and others.

M & F says that “the resident agents did not have the obligation to know the final beneficiaries of the regulated clients … That means that our deceased firm did not have the obligation to know which were the final beneficiaries of these companies ” because the laws that introduced this control began to take effect in the British Virgin Islands in 2017, where the firm maintained 70% of the societies.

According to the latest ICIJ publication, two years after the scandal of the ‘Panama Papers’ (2016), the employees of the firm started working to discover who their clients were.

“We condemn the misrepresentation of information with out-of-context data … trying to make it appear that the firm was a promoter of illegalities when the real crime was the theft of our information,” says the firm’s communication via the instant messaging service.