By Will Fitzgibbon, Emilia Diaz-Struck and Michael Hudson
Police in Panama (click here) arrested the founders of Mossack Fonseca, the law firm at the center of the Panama Papers scandal, on money-laundering charges Thursday after authorities raided the firm’s headquarters as part of investigations into Brazil’s largest-ever bribery scandal.
The firm’s founding partners, Ramón Fonseca and Jürgen Mossack, spent Thursday night in police cells, according to the men’s lawyer. Kenia Porcell, Panama’s attorney general, released a statement that said evidence gathered by her office indicated that the law firm was a potential “criminal organization” that concealed and removed evidence related to “illegal activity.”...
The USA? Really?
By AP
President Vladimir Putin (click here) on Thursday denied having any links to offshore accounts and described the Panama Papers document leaks scandal as part of a US-led plot to weaken Russia....
...The Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists said the documents it obtained indicated that Russian cellist Sergei Roldugin acted as a front man for a network of Putin loyalists, and, perhaps, the president himself.
The ICIJ said the documents show how complex offshore financial deals channeled as much as $2 billion to a network of people linked to the Russian president.
Putin said Roldugin, a longtime friend, did nothing wrong. He said he was proud of Roldugin, adding that the musician spent his personal money to advance cultural projects.
Roldugin used the money he earned as a minority shareholder of a Russian company to buy rare musical instruments abroad and hand them over to the Russian state, Putin said....
