It’s official.
Twenty-eight people who were charged with money laundering in an international legal case stemming from the release of the Panama Papers—a group which includes the co-founder of the law firm that, according to authorities, was the fulcrum of the conspiracy to hide criminal activities and the money they generated—have been acquitted by a judge in Panama City.
Jurgan Mossack, co-founder of the law firm Mossack & Fonseca, with now-deceased business partner Ramón Fonseca, was acquitted during court proceedings on Friday (along with twenty-seven other defendants) when a judge in the Panamanian court found that the prosecution and investigation teams had not met the burden imposed by chain-of-custody requirements for evidence obtained from a raid of the offices of the now-defunct law firm.
Mossack, Fonseca, and the others in the defendant group had been accused by prosecutors of funnelling complex transactions through a string of offshore holding companies in order to obscure the source of monies stemming from illegal activities related to a Brazillian corruption operation called the “Car Wash scandal.” The construction company at the center of the operation, Odenbrecht, previously pleaded guilty in a United Stats Federal court to a charge related to using the shell companies to conceal bribes totaling millions of dollars, which were aimed at buying public contract awards.
The massive trial was a result of Judge Baloisa Marquínez’s decision to combine the Panama Papers case with the “Operation Car Wash” case.
Marquínez determined that the non-tainted evidence in the Panama Papers case did not rise to the standard required to assign criminal responsibility to the accused. The judge also lifted anti-flight precautionary measures that had been imposed on the persons and property of the defendants.
The defense attorney, Guillermina Mc Donald, who represented Fonseca and Mossack and whose firm represented eighty percent of the other defendants, expressed her satisfaction at the ruling, but said that the feeling came with reservations as so many lives had been disrupted by the proceedings.
