[Cross-posted from European Tribune – where dissent is NOT troll rated!]
Argentina President Mauricio Macri
Others reacted to news of the breach with disbelief and anger. According to internal Mossack Fonseca emails, one Uruguayan accountant rejected the law firm’s suggestion that he hand-write and backdate a document to make it appear that the firm had accurate information from the beginning on the ownership of a company controlled by the family of Argentina President Mauricio Macri. The idea was dropped after the accountant reportedly told Mossack Fonseca the document would be “easily refuted by an expert calligrapher.” (A Macri family company spokesman told ICIJ partner La Nación that the president’s father had declared his ownership and had no further comment.)
Beny Steinmetz under investigation for bribery and corruption
A lawyer representing Nigeria’s powerful Senate president Bukola Saraki and his wife took an overnight flight from London to Panama. And one of Switzerland’s highest-profile lawyers excoriated the firm on behalf of the family of Beny Steinmetz, a mining executive now under investigation in Israel for alleged bribery and corruption in Africa .
“The leaking of information of which Mossack Fonseca & Co was the guardian has caused damage to our clients, who were wrong to have trusted you and believed in your abilities and professional rigor,” wrote lawyer Marc Bonnant.
Continued below the fold …
A spokeswoman for Steinmetz told ICIJ the bribery and corruption allegations are baseless. One finance professional told Mossack Fonseca that he had never given permission for his name to be written on offshore company documents, let alone made public.
“It’s gob smacking, and I demand you DELETE my name from all your files,” Jean-Yves de Louvigny wrote in an email to Mossack Fonseca’s office in Luxembourg.
“I am stunned by the fact that someone else can provide my name without my consent!,” de Louvigny wrote. The banker had seen his name published as part of the Panama Papers but claimed he had never had any involvement with an offshore company.
Secret business partner could complicate Kushner’s White House role | Seattle Times – April 2017 |
For much of the roughly $50 million in down payments, Kushner turned to an undisclosed overseas partner. Public records and shell companies shield the investor’s identity. But, it turns out, the money came from a member of Israel’s Steinmetz family, which built a fortune as one of the world’s leading diamond traders.
A Kushner Cos. spokeswoman and several Steinmetz representatives said Raz Steinmetz, 53, was behind the deals. His uncle, and the family’s most prominent figure, is billionaire Beny Steinmetz, who is under scrutiny by law-enforcement authorities in four countries.
In the United States, federal prosecutors are investigating whether representatives of his firm bribed government officials in Guinea to secure a multibillion-dollar mining concession. In Israel, Steinmetz was detained in December and questioned in a bribery and money-laundering investigation. In Switzerland and Guinea, prosecutors have conducted similar inquiries.
The Steinmetz partnership with Kushner underscores the mystery behind his family’s multibillion-dollar business and its potential for conflicts with his role as perhaps the second-most powerful man in the White House, behind only his father-in-law, President Donald Trump.
The new leaked data from the Panama Papers show that Mossack Fonseca wanted to discontinue its relationship with the Israeli diamond billionaire Daniel Steinmetz right after the first publications in 2016. The Panamanians even report to the financial regulator FIA of the British Virgin Islands possible money laundering by Steinmetz and 31 affiliated companies in tax havens.
Five of these companies appear in the Panama Papers in relation to a loan from the Belgian branch of ABN Amro. Together they guarantee a credit of 100 million dollars that ABN will provide to Diacore, the diamond company of Daniel Steinmetz, in February 2016. That loan is still active, according to internal correspondence from ABN Amro.
The money laundering suspicions of Mossack Fonseca against Steinmetz are not new at all. The Panamanians rely on publications from 2015, when the diamond billionaire was mentioned in the so-called SwissLeaks, about secret accounts at the Swiss branch of the British bank HSBC.
Steinmetz appears to share an account with Dan Gertler, an Israeli billionaire suspected of large-scale bribery and corruption in the Congo. At the end of last year, the United States therefore places Gertler on the sanction list, making it punishable in America to do business with him.
In addition, there is also the controversial brother Beny Steinmetz, who is involved in a major bribery and corruption case in West African Guinea. A government committee concluded in 2014 that a few years earlier, through bribery, he had acquired the rights to a large iron ore mine in that country. His company BSGR obtained the concession in 2008 for 160 million dollars and sold half of that shortly afterwards for 2.5 billion. Since then he has been the subject of research in the United States, Switzerland and Israel. In the latter country he was arrested late last year because of the bribery case.
From my earlier diary …
○ Mueller Set for Interview of Donald Trump … with link to article:
○ Kushner’s financial ties to Israel raise questions over peace broker role | Middle East Monitor |
Further reading …
○ Black Cube and Oligarchs in the Shadows | TikunOlam |
○ Black Cube – a “Mossad-style” business intelligence co
oaquabonita – the obsessive heckler here, here, here and here.
[Comments off-topic … want a flame war, do start your own diary]
