Ten days after the search at the headquarters of law firm Mossack & Fonseca, in Panama, the prosecution team specially created for this case proceeded to carry out other similar action, at a local law firm located in Parque Lefevre.
The proceeding was headed by Prosecutor Javier Caraballo, who as he was leaving the location, limited himself to only say that several boxes with documents that relate to the law firm were being taken away.
"We have found a lot of documentation which allegedly belongs to the firm," were his words.
These documents will be guarded by the police and will be part of the material to be verified by the Prosecutor's office conducting the investigation, after the global scandal generated by leaked information about the activities of Mossack & Fonseca.
Seven vehicles were used by the Public Prosecutor's Office to transport the boxes with documents seized from the premises, as well as transparent bags with the papers that had been shredded.
This attracted the attention of journalists covering the search, however, the firm, after the proceeding, reacted on what they the prosecutor's office team had found.
According to Mossack & Fonseca, all the law firm´s files are digitized, so the documents that were found by the public prosecutor must already be possessed by it, after the search carried out on
April 13. The law firm implied that these premises served as a deposit and that the shredded papers were going to be sent to recycling companies.
Caraballo said they will proceed to "assemble" the shredded papers to analyze the content of these documents.
In the first search that lasted for 27 hours, Prosecutor Caraballo said all the digital information was removed from the firm, which has nearly a hundred servers.
Caraballo said that he counted on Ramón Fonseca Mora´s collaboration, one of the owners of the law firm, although at the beginning of the legal action it became known that there was some resistance.
A day earlier, on 11 April, the Office of the Prosecutor-General of Intellectual Property conducted an ocular inspection to the law firm, which reported that its computer platform was "hacked", as
initially discussed, when the international research was disseminated.
After 20 days that Panama Papers were disclosed, the belated reaction of the authorities before this scandal engulfing Mossack & Fonseca is still being criticized.
Last Wednesday it was known that the US justice system started a criminal investigation in this case, by appointing the Prosecutor of New York, Preet Bharara, considered one of the most tenacious in the courts of the United States.
Bharara asked the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists - ICIJ-, co-authors of the informative work, for the cooperation.
However, ICIJ already announced that they will not play any role in the investigation that Bharara is carrying out.
The director of the Consortium, Gerard Ryle, said that their only task is journalism and thus will not become a weapon of the security forces.
