[PHOTO:MALAYSIANOW.COM]
A prestigious Panamanian law firm was named in the so-called “Pandora Papers” as implicated in the creation of offshore shell companies meant to hide money in tax havens for more than 160 politicians and public figures.They included “some accused of looting their countries,” according to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which obtained the leaked documents as part of the Pandora Papers, published Sunday, which sent shockwaves of embarrassment through powerful circles.
Aleman, Cordero, Galindo & Lee, or Alcogal, was involved in creating shell companies to move money for Jordanian King Abdullah II, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis, Montenegro President Milo Djukanovic and three former presidents from Panama, among others, according to the bombshell release.
Others involved with Alcogal — co-founded in the 1980s by the son of a former Panamanian ambassador to the United States who then became ambassador himself — include a Honduran presidential candidate and a former president of Ecuador.
The firm also worked with figures in some of the most notorious financial scandals of the last decade, including the massive Latin American bribery plot involving Brazilian construction company Odebrecht and the soccer corruption case known as “Fifagate,” according to the ICIJ.
In a report, the ICIJ enumerated the 14,000 offshore entities in Belize, the British Virgin Islands and Panama created with the help of Alcogal in an effort to stash money away from public scrutiny for some 15,000 clients since 1996.
So prolific was the law firm’s offshore involvement that nearly two million of the 11.9 million leaked documents associated with the Pandora Papers — which were reported on by some 600 journalists — came from Alcogal.