Mossack Fonseca
Mossack Fonseca & Co. () was a Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider. At one time it was the world's fourth-largest provider of offshore financial services. From its 1977 foundation until the April 2016 publication of the Panama Papers, it remained mostly obscure, even though it sat at the heart of the global offshore industry and acted for about 300,000 companies. More than half were registered in British tax havens, as well as in the United Kingdom. The firm received worldwide media attention in April 2016, when the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published information about the financial dealings of the firm's clients in the Panama Papers articles. These articles were the result of analyzing an enormous cache of documents, dated from 1970 and 2015, which were leaked to the news media, and which "implicated at least 140 politicians from more than 50 countries" in tax evasion schemes. On 14 March 2018, the firm announced that it was closing due to the damage inflicted to its finances and reputation by the discovery of the multi-billion-dollar money laundering schemes. History and practice areas The firm was founded by German lawyer Jürgen Mossack in 1977, and joined by Panamanian novelist and