Panama Papers (Europe)

[1][2] The documents, some dating back to the 1970s, were created by, and taken from, Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca,[3] and were leaked in 2015 by an anonymous source.

Moscovici told reporters the use of offshore companies to hide what he called "shocking amounts" of financial assets from tax authorities was "unethical".

[6] In a 2013 letter, unearthed by the Financial Times to the then president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron said that offshore trusts should not automatically be subject to the same transparency requirements as shell companies.

[7][8] The Panama Papers revealed that the Minister of Finance of Andorra, Jordi Cinca, while he was CEO of Orfund SA, maintained an offshore company called Mariette Holdings Inc, until its dissolution in 2002 for fear of discovery of his participation in these businesses.

[9][10][11][12][13][14] Austria's financial market authority has announced that they will audit two Austrian banks that were mentioned in the Panama Papers – Raiffeisenbank International (RBI) and Hypo Vorarlberg [de].

[16] Later, they published a story about the offshore company Viafot which is attempting to acquire a key asset of Bulgaria's defense industry: the arms producer Dunarit.

[21][22] French financial prosecutors opened a probe, and former President François Hollande declared that tax evaders would be brought to trial and punished.

Drawing official scrutiny was an undeclared HSBC account containing €2.2m in gold and coins, managed from Geneva by an aide through a trust based in the British Virgin Islands which was closed and then moved to the Bahamas in 2014; allegations of overbilling;[31] misuse and comingling of campaign funds;[31][32] and tax evasion.

[41][42] The Reykjavik Grapevine and the news site Kjarninn revealed that President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson had connections to Lasca Finance Limited, registered in 2005 in the British Virgin Islands.

[38] Hrólfur Ölvisson, the managing director of Sigmundur Davíð's Progressive Party, says the Mossack Fonseca companies that list his name have been inactive for a very long time, and were legal.

[44] Ingibjörg is the primary owner of the 365 media group, which owns the Icelandic news outlets Vísir.is, television channel Stöð 2 and radio stations Bylgjan, X-ið [is] and FM 957, none of which seem to be reporting this disclosure.

[49] Other notable people whose names are mentioned in the Papers include entrepreneurs Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, Flavio Briatore, Adriano Galliani, and actor Carlo Verdone.

[71] In October 2017, Daphne Caruana Galizia, a blogger who led the Panama Papers investigation into corruption in Malta, was killed by a car bomb near her home.

[72] Since then Malta, as an EU Member State, has been required to strengthen the transparency of its registers of corporate ownership, showing who ultimately controls every company within its jurisdiction.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of the newspapers participating in the project that made the papers public, described the connections of various individuals listed in them to Russian president Vladimir Putin.

"[94] On 2016's annual Direct Line with Vladimir Putin, he called the leaked documents "reliable" but confined his comments to Roldugin, saying that Western media did not understand that the musician has spent all his off-shore income on "musical instruments for Russia".

[100] On April 15, 2016, José Manuel Soria was forced to leave his post as acting Minister of Industry, Energy and Tourism when the Panama Papers revealed that he and his family had maintained several offshore societies in tax havens during the previous decades.

Former IMF president Rodrigo Rato, vice-president in the conservative government of Prime Minister José María Aznar, had more than €3.6 million in two offshore companies.

[104] Micaela Domecq-Solís, the wife of Miguel Arias Cañete, currently the European Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy and formerly the EU Minister of Agriculture, Food and Environment, also opened shell societies.

Moreover, in a huge corruption scandal involving the royal house, Iñaki Urdangarin and his business associate in the Nóos foundation, were advised by Mossack Fonseca to move funds.

[110] The current wife of former prime minister of Spain Felipe González, María García Vaquero, opened an account in Switzerland for Carmingo Ltd in 2004 in the tax haven of Niue, an island in the South Pacific.

[117] Other celebrities involved include Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, who won an Oscar in 2003 for Habla con ella and with his brother Agustin created a company in 1991 called Glen Valley in the British Virgin Islands.

[120][121][122] Juan Luis Cebrián, journalist, co-founder of El País, and CEO of Prisa, a Spanish media conglomerate, owns 2% of Star Petroleum, a related oil corporation with tax havens.

[130] The Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (FI) later said that they would also investigate the other three big banks in Sweden: Handelsbanken, Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken (SEB) and Swedbank.

[131][133][134] On April 6, the federal police searched UEFA headquarters in Nyon as part of a "criminal mismanagement" probe into a Champions League television rights deal signed by FIFA's new president Gianni Infantino.

[136] On April 8, a few hours after the publication of a new series of articles focusing on art hidden behind offshore companies, a prosecutor sequestered a Modigliani worth some $25 million at Geneva Freeport.

[143] Oleh Lyashko, leader of the Radical Party, urged lawmakers to begin impeachment proceedings,[143] and even some of his allies backed calls for a parliamentary commission to investigate the allegations.

[143] In the Ukrainian Parliament, relations between the Poroshenko bloc and the People's Front party of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk had over previous months already soured, with mutual accusations of corruption.

[161] Former Business Secretary Vince Cable agreed, although former attorney general Dominic Grieve described the proposal as a "bit of a nuclear option"[162] which would "destroy the livelihoods" of BVI inhabitants in the finance industry.

[165] Jennie Granger, a spokeswoman for HMRC, said that the department had received "a great deal of information on offshore companies, including in Panama, from a wide range of sources, which is currently the subject of intensive investigation".