PANAMA CITY (AP) — Panamanian lawyer Ramón Fonseca, one of the partners of the Mossack & Fonseca law firm who was at the center of the Panama Papers scandal, has died, the former firm’s lawyer, Guillermina McDonald, confirmed Thursday. . She was 71 years old.
His death occurs almost three weeks after a trial for the Panama Papers case ended in which the prosecution asked to convict 26 defendants for the alleged crime of money laundering, including Fonseca and Jürgen Mossack.
McDonald said in a telephone message to The Associated Press that Fonseca was hospitalized two days before the start of that process, which ended on April 19 and is awaiting sentencing. He specified that his death occurred around 9:30 pm on Wednesday.
The Panama Papers had to do with the publication in 2016 of 11 million secret financial documents from that Panamanian law firm that illustrated how some of the richest people in the world hid their money in tax havens or founded companies overseas to transfer or move money. dark
The documents were first leaked to the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
The repercussions of the leaks were far-reaching. They caused the resignation of the Prime Minister of Iceland and called into question the leaders of Argentina and Ukraine, several Chinese politicians and Russian President Vladimir Putin, among others.
At the end of the trial of the Papales of Panama that took place in this capital, Mossack addressed the court and said that Fonseca had not appeared because he had been “very affected by this process as well as members of his family.”
“The ailments he has are not all of physical origin. Many of them are caused by the stress, pain and hopelessness that this process has produced in him,” he noted at the time.
Mossack, a lawyer of German origin, and his Panamanian partner founded the law firm in 1977 and it became one of the most important in the creation of public limited companies and offshore companies.
On February 10, 2017, both lawyers were provisionally detained in the middle of an investigation into the firm’s alleged participation in the “Lava Jato” case, one of the most notorious corruption scandals in Brazil.
Fonseca argued that the firm had no control over how its thousands of clients could use the tools that were created for them.
The Panamanian law firm, which helped build and sell some 240,000 companies in four decades of operation, according to its records, announced the closure of operations inside and outside the country in March 2018, almost two years after the scandal surfaced.
Shortly before the Panama Papers scandal broke out, Fonseca served as minister advisor in the government of then-president Juan Carlos Varela (2014-2019). The lawyer was also a writer.
