Britain's Guardian newspaper said the documents showed a network of
secret offshore deals and loans worth $2 billion led to close friends of
Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Panama lawyer at center of data leak denounces attack on privacy(Reuters)
The head of a Panama-based
law firm at the center of a massive leak of offshore financial data on
Sunday denied any wrongdoing, and said his firm has fallen victim to "an international campaign against privacy".
German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung
said it received a cache of 11.5 million leaked documents from the law
firm's database, and shared them with more than 100 other international
news outlets as well as the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).
Ramon Fonseca,
the director of Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, specialized in
setting up offshore companies, said in a telephone interview with
Reuters that his firm had suffered a successful but "limited" hack.
Fonseca,
the firm's co-founder and until March a senior government official in
Panama, said his firm has formed more than 240,000 companies, adding
that the "vast majority" have been used for "legitimate purposes."
The
ICIJ report published on Sunday details billions of dollars of shadowy
financial transactions moved through numerous offshore accounts.
Britain's
Guardian newspaper said the documents showed a network of secret
offshore deals and loans worth $2 billion led to close friends of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Reuters couldn't independently confirm those details.
Fonseca emphasized that the firm is not responsible for the activities of the companies it incorporates.
"We're
dedicated to making legal structures which we sell to intermediaries
such as banks, lawyers, accountants and trusts, and they have their
end-customers that we don't know," said Fonseca.
He
said that all of the firm's clients have been notified of "this
problem," arguing that the firm has been caught up in an international
anti-privacy campaign.
"We believe there's an
international campaign against privacy. Privacy is a sacred human right
(but) there are people in the world who do not understand that and we
definitely believe in privacy and will continue working so that legal
privacy can work," he said.
The law firm said in a separate statement published by the Guardian: "It
appears that you have had unauthorized access to proprietary documents
and information taken from our company and have presented and
interpreted them out of context."
Panama's
government said in a statement on Sunday that it will cooperate with any
eventual judicial proceeding relating to the allegations in the report.
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