Mossack Fonseca Inc: a Panamanian company of the Mossack Fonseca group

analysisThe dossier follows one company of the Mossack Fonseca group, Mossack Fonseca Inc (Folio 210666 (S)), through its own registry and tax records from its 1988 incorporation to its listing as dissolved or inactive in 2026, and identifies the law partnership behind it, registered under number 3957 as Mossack, Fonseca & Co. and Bufete MF & Co., as its agent and the employer of the people listed as its officers. It sets the officers' directorship counts side by side by source, keeps the firm's denials beside the journalists' accounts of its nominee-director service, separates the Nevada court's jurisdictional findings from findings of liability, and treats the Bolivian court's single use of the name 'Mossack Fonseca Inc.' as an unresolved identification. The Panamanian criminal case is followed from the 2017 arrests to the 2024 acquittals and their confirmation on appeal in 2026. ^{1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29}

analysisMossack Fonseca Inc is a Panamanian corporation (sociedad anónima) in the Mercantile section of the Public Registry, Folio 210666 (S). Commercial restatements give 23 June 1988 as its date of incorporation and 28 June 1988 as the date of its registry entry; no registry certificate is among the retained records. Panama's Directorate General of Revenue (DGI) lists it under taxpayer number (RUC) 23997-10-210666. A January 2014 review of Mossack & Fonseca based on the registry describes the firm as divided into several legal entities, two of them dated 1988: Mossack Fonseca Inc and Mossack Fonseca & Co Trading Inc. The review notes that the shareholders of a Panamanian sociedad anónima do not appear in the public registry, and it does not show who held the shares of Mossack Fonseca Inc. ^{1 2 3 4 5 6}

analysisIn 2016 a DGI resolution put Mossack Fonseca Inc on its list of legal persons that had not paid the annual single fee (tasa única) for ten consecutive years; under the resolution that means removal from the registry with the entity deemed dissolved, subject to a three-year period in which it could be rehabilitated. The resolution says nothing else about the activity of the listed entities. A commercial company-information service's filing list shows that on 6 October 2025 the registry entered suspension annotations for unpaid fees against the company (only the titles of these filings were seen), and on 2 April 2026 nine office-holders, the resident agent among them, left it; their names are not shown in the retained restatements. A commercial company-information service now describes the company as dissolved and a company-information website as inactive; no later reinstatement appears in the retained records. ^{5 7 1 3}

analysisA separate commercial registry-data service's copy of the registry card lists nine 'directivos' of the company: Ana Maria Escobar, Amraj de Singh, Jose Alberto Ruiz, Diva Argelis Patiño de Donado, Leticia Montoya, Francis Perez, Cornelio McKay and the law firm Mossack, Fonseca & Co., with several names repeated; the office each held, and when, is not shown. A company-registry aggregator names the firm as the company's agent. Several of these names recur across thousands of companies: from registry data up to October 2014, a regional journalism network counted at least 52,696 persons registered by the firm as directors of Panamanian companies, and a German newspaper, working from the leaked records, described Leticia Montoya as one of the firm's most frequent nominee directors. Montoya told the newspaper by telephone that she knew nothing specific about the companies she headed and did not answer a written request; in a general statement the firm denied offering structures designed to hide the identity of true owners and said its services always rested on legally recognised arrangements used by all providers in the industry. ^{1 2 3 4 5 6}

analysisThe firm is a Panamanian partnership of lawyers registered under number 3957: a 2003 deed calls it Mossack Fonseca & Co., registered at Ficha C-003957, and a commercial registry-data service lists Bufete MF & Co. (MF Legal Services) at Folio 3957 (M). Treating the two names as one partnership rests on that number and on the prosecutors' wording, not on a registry certificate. Secondary accounts trace the firm to the practice Jürgen Mossack started in Panama in 1977, which became Mossack Fonseca in 1986 when Ramón Fonseca joined as partner; no founding deed is retained. In a 2019 pleading the two men stated that they owned Bufete MF & Co. as equal partners, and the corporation Mossack Fonseca & Co., S.A. as equal shareholders; the court summarised this as background and did not rule on it. ^{1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9}

analysisFrom April 2016 about 11.5 million of the firm's internal legal and financial documents, published mainly through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists as the Panama Papers, became the basis of worldwide reporting on offshore companies; the leaked documents themselves are not among the retained records. The firm called itself the victim of a worldwide cyberattack and said that ICIJ, working from stolen information, had presented a mistaken picture of its services; Ramón Fonseca said its network had been compromised by hackers in 2015. In March 2018 the firm announced that, after reducing its offices and staff worldwide to fewer than 50 people, it would stop serving the public at the end of the month, while a small team kept answering requests from the authorities. By its own account no criminal proceedings had been opened against it for its company-formation service in any jurisdiction where it incorporated companies, the only investigations were in Panama, and it had supplied all the information the authorities requested. ^{6 10}

analysisPanama's supervisor of non-financial entities fined Bufete MF & Co B/.300,000 in 2018 for breaches of the anti-money-laundering law of 2015 and the 2011 law on resident agents; its register does not describe the facts found. In 2015 a U.S. magistrate judge in Nevada, ruling on discovery sought by the creditor NML Capital, held that the firm's Nevada company acted as its agent and alter ego for jurisdictional purposes; these were findings made to decide jurisdiction over a non-party, not findings of liability, and the retained records do not show what the firm produced afterwards or whether the order was challenged. ^{1 2}

analysisIn Panama, according to a Panamanian news outlet, prosecutors asked in 2019 for 34 of the firm's employees, its two founding partners among them, to be tried for money laundering, concluding that the firm had concealed the origin and ownership of illicit money by creating structures that kept clients' identities hidden. At trial all 28 remaining defendants, Mossack among them, were acquitted on 28 June 2024, and Fonseca's criminal liability was declared extinguished by his death; on 10 August 2026 the Higher Court confirmed the acquittal in full. The first-instance court had found that evidence taken from the firm's servers did not meet chain-of-custody requirements and that the remaining evidence was insufficient. ^{3 4 5}

analysisIn January 2022 a Bolivian court convicted former executives of the electricity distributor ELFEC over the sale of its shares to SOELBO, one of three Panamanian companies formed in 2007; another Bolivian newspaper reported prison sentences of between five and ten years for the convicted defendants. The court wrote that the defendants had been advised by 'Mossack Fonseca Inc., of Panama', but elsewhere calls the adviser 'Mossack Fonseca & CO.' and 'the law office Mosack Fonseca of Panama' and gives no registry number, so the reference may be to the law firm rather than to the company at Folio 210666 (S). The firm, Mossack Fonseca Inc and the firm's employees were not parties to the Bolivian case, and the court's findings concern the defendants; the retained records do not show whether the judgment was appealed or became final. ^{6 7}