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Eight years after the global financial scandal broke, 28 defendants have been acquitted due to lack of evidence.
The defendants in the global financial scandal known as the Panama Papers are accused of laundering money using 215,000 shell companies in tax havens – a method politicians, celebrities and athletes are said to have used to hide their assets.
(dpa/Reuters)
Eight years after the Panama Papers global financial scandal was exposed, 28 defendants were unexpectedly acquitted, including German-born lawyer Jürgen Mossack. The Panama City court announced the news on Friday. In addition, the presiding judge Baloísa Marquinez ordered the suspension of the criminal proceedings against the now deceased Ramón Fonseca Mora.
When evidence was collected from the servers of the now-liquidated law firm Mossack Fonseca, the chain of evidence could not be traced. The judge ruled that the remaining evidence was insufficient and irrefutable.
The defendants are accused of setting up 215,000 shell companies in tax havens where politicians, celebrities and athletes allegedly hid their assets to launder money. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Argentine President Mauricio Macri and Argentine soccer star Lionel Messi are among those named in this regard.
The investigation, launched in 2014, has uncovered widespread corruption in Latin America and sent dozens of politicians and business leaders to prison, including several former presidents.
In the spring of 2016, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Investigative Journalists Network (ICIJ) and other media outlets revealed the operations of shell companies established in Panama. As a result of a massive data breach, 11.5 million documents were leaked to the newspaper. Nearly 400 journalists from more than 80 countries participated in the research.
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