Panama Papers case: 28 defendants acquitted because “evidence was insufficient”

A court in Panama acquitted the defendants on Friday 28 defendants in the ‘Panama Papers’ case, the historic leak of documents from the defunct Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which linked various world personalities to money laundering, reported the Judicial Branch (OJ).

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“The second judge, Liquidator of Criminal Cases, Baloísa Marquínez (…) acquitted 28 people accused of a crime against the economic order in the form of money laundering, in the accumulated cases of the cases called ‘Panama Papers’ and ‘Lava Jato’, followed by the law firm Mossack Fonseca and its collaborators, as well as citizens of German nationality,” the Judicial Branch detailed in a statement.

In the ruling, the judge points out that in the Panama Papers it was determined that the evidence collected on the servers of Mossack Fonseca, with electronic evidence that was contributed to the process on paper, “They did not comply with the chain of custody, as well as the principles governing digital evidence mainly due to the lack of hash values ​​(a mathematical algorithm for transforming blocks of data) that would allow for certainty of their authenticity and integrity.”

Furthermore, the judge concluded that “the rest of the evidence was not sufficient and conclusive to determine responsibility of the accused, both of the funds coming from Germany, as well as those from Argentina”.

Judge Marquínez decreed the “extinction of the criminal action due to the death of one of those identified in this process.” This is the lawyer Ramón Fonseca Mora, head and co-founder of the Mossack & Fonseca law firm, who He died on May 9th due to pneumonia that became complicated, according to what his relatives told EFE.

Likewise, he ordered the lifting of the personal and real precautionary measures against all the defendants, among whom is the German lawyer Jürgen Mossack, founding partner of the firm along with Fonseca Mora. Mossack was cleared of all charges.

In the Lava Jato case, the ruling indicates that “it was not possible to determine the income of money from illicit sources, coming from Brazil, to the Panamanian financial system with the purpose of hiding, covering up, dissimulating or helping to evade the legal consequences of the preceding crime”.

The Brazilian ‘Lava Jato’ plot was combined into a single file with the ‘Panama Papers’ case, given the similarity in terms of the defendants and the facts investigated by the Prosecutor’s Office.

The investigation into this case began in 2016 “due to news events related to the ‘Lava Jato’ operation in Brazil, which allegedly linked a law firm in Panama dedicated to the creation of corporations,” as recalled by the Judicial Branch.

For its part, the Panama Papers trial began on April 8, eight years after the historic leak of documents from the defunct Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which linked personalities from around the world to money laundering.

The Panama Papers trial concluded on April 19but the judge took the 30-day period allowed by law to issue her verdict in this case investigated by the Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP, Prosecutor’s Office).

The cumulative process It consists of 837 volumes and more than 427,000 pages.

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