Ramon Fonseca and Jurgen Mossack, the founders of the Mossack Fonseca company have been detained in Panama. EFE news agency reported that on Friday, February 10.
The detainees face charges with corruption, specifically the financial frauds, that they are said to have practiced in the Brazilian state-run oil company Petrobras.
The case has been under investigation since 2014. The law enforcers say that top managers of Petrobras signed deals with contractors at deliberately inflated prices, and also bribed certain politicians. The Petrobras case was the one that led to the impeachment of the-then Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, who chaired the company from 2003 till 2010.
Mossack Fonseca company became widely famous during the world-wide Panama Papers scandal, when journalists and dozens of media all over the planet simultaneously released materials about owners of large offshore businesses. The investigation was based on the so-called Panama Archive, the selection of documents belonging to Mossack Fonseca, Panama-based low-profile company.
About a hundred of powerful politicians and celebrities are on Mossack Fonseca’s database, which contains about 11 million materials and 2.6 terabytes of digital data. Initially, the documents came across reporters of Süddeutsche Zeitung, which passed them to the ICIJ, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. More than a hundred media and 400 reporters were involved in the work on the Panama Archive.
Source: EFE
