Mossack Fonseca: a $1.5bn business over 20 Years

Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca may have billed as much as $1.5bn over the past 20 years, according to investigative lawyer Italo Antinori. The firm is reported to charge $150 per annum per company, simply to provide nominal directors. Mr. Antinori provided the example of Leticia Montoya, a clerk working at the firm, who appears in none less than 10,967 companies created by the firm, according to the Panamanian Public Registry. He went on to estimate that Mr. Montoya must hav billed $1.5m per annum for the service, adding up to $15m over the course of a 10 year period. These sums of money are in sharp contrast with the actual lifestyle enjoyed by Ms. Montoya, who lives in the working-class Vacamonte neighbourhood and enjoys a meagre salary of $900 per month. The information was contained in one of the internal firm documents released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). And Ms. Montoya’s case is by no means an isolated one: other clerical staff at the firm appear to have acted as nominal directors for a vast number of entities – Francis Perez shows up as director in 10,544 companies, and Katia Solano, also HR director of the law firm, in over 5000.

Firm knew of client’s activities

Italo Antinori takes direct issue with Ramón Fonseca Mora’s claim that the law firm was not obliged to know the final identity of its clients. “The law compels us to know who our final clients are”, he argued. This is especially true since 2011, when a bill was passed that made it compulsory that law firms know the identity of final beneficiaries of any entity they may incorporate. In addition, law firms are not only supposed to reject clients whose background may be doubtful, but also to report them to the Panamanian Financial Analysis Unit, he added, as stipulated in Article 11 of Law 23 April 2015.