Legal
Panama Law Firm Reportedly Sues Journalist Consortium Over Data Leak

The Panama-based law firm at the centre of the saga over leaked accounts has taken the legal gloves off against the Washington-based journalists' consortium, which has published a vast trove of data.
Mossack
Fonseca, the law firm at the centre of the Panama Papers
affair, is reportedly suing a journalists’ group for leaking
data it says is false, adding another twist to a saga that
has caused a country’s prime minister to resign and sent
shockwaves through the offshore world.
The law firm is filing suit against the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Just
as this news was being reported, the ICIJ put a searchable
database of more than 200,000 offshore companies onto its
website. The Washington DC-based organisation first revealed that
it had obtained the leaked, or stolen, data in April.
The Panama Papers saga has seen the downfall of Icelandic prime
minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, and, ironically, a senior
Chilean figure in the global watchdog on dirty money,
Transparency
International. The papers also purportedly show that
Australian premier Malcolm Turnbull had a British Virgin
Islands-based firm that was created by Mossack Fonseca. UK
prime minister David Cameron’s late father also had an
account at one stage that was based out of Panama.
The affair has reignited debate on the proper distinction that
should be drawn between legitimate client privacy and secrecy, as
well as the issue of whether beneficial owners of trusts and
other structures should be publicly disclosed.
The ICIJ’s database is drawn from the 11.5 million documents
leaked from Mossack Fonseca.
According to a report by AFP, the French news service,
the law firm urged the ICIJ to cease and desist prior to the leak
online, but it moved ahead with the release.
“The Consortium has forced us to start aggressive legal action to
protect ourselves from acts such as these, which, since they are
crimes, must be taken to the proper bodies for due process,” the
company said in a statement released earlier this week. This
publication has contacted Mossack Fonseca seeking additional
comment.
In recent years, banks such as Julius Baer, LGT, Credit Suisse
and HSBC Private Bank have been hit by leaks/thefts of client
data. In some cases, that data was subsequently bought
by foreign governments hunting for alleged tax evaders. In the
HSBC case, a former employee, Hervé Falciani, who reportedly
took data in 2006-07, has been tried and sentenced in
his absence by a Swiss court.
As far as the ICIJ is concerned, its activities have involved
leaks from jurisdictions including Luxembourg, Guernsey and
Switzerland.
To view an editorial about the data leaks, and the issues they
raise, see
here.