Jürgen Mossack

analysisAn online encyclopedia describes Jürgen Mossack as a German and Panamanian lawyer and co-founder of Mossack Fonseca, a former law firm headquartered in Panama City with more than 40 offices worldwide; a news outlet called him German-born. According to an online encyclopedia he served on Conarex, Panama's council on foreign relations, from 2009 to 2014, and announced on 7 April 2016 that he was resigning from it because of the leak. A local-history wiki and an online encyclopedia say he started his own law practice in Panama in 1977, which became Mossack Fonseca in 1986 when Ramón Fonseca joined as partner; another Panamanian newspaper dates the constitution of the partnership Mossack, Fonseca & Co to 24 January 1986, while other accounts date the foundation by both men to 1977. These are secondary accounts; no founding deed is retained. ^{1 2 3 4 5}

analysisIn the 2019 complaint against Netflix, Mossack and Fonseca stated that they owned the law partnership Bufete MF & Co. as equal partners and the corporation Mossack Fonseca & Co, S.A. as equal shareholders, their own statement, which the court summarised as background without ruling on it. A regional journalism network found him as director or subscriber of 3,664 Panamanian companies in registry data up to October 2014, and a separate commercial registry-data service's name-matched page shows 10,325 company links, with a warning that its matching may combine several people and that searches suggest possible namesakes; positions are shown only to subscribers, so it does not show his position in Mossack Fonseca Inc. A 2014 secondary review of the registry places him in director and secretary positions across the group's companies but does not show who held the shares of Mossack Fonseca Inc. Commercial restatements list him, without positions, among the officers or in the structure of Mossack Fonseca & Co. Trading Inc. and Mossack Fonseca Corporate Services Ltd. Inc., and aggregator data name him in the structure of Mossack Fonseca, Abogados, a partnership whose purpose the retained records do not state. ^{6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17}

analysisAccording to the journalists' book, The Mossack Family Foundation, a Panamanian private interest foundation incorporated in January 1997, is the centre of his private asset planning: it owns his private offshore companies and receives all the profits from the group's activities, and he is its principal beneficiary; no retained record ties the shares of Mossack Fonseca Inc to it. The book also reads a leaked bank form as showing that Tornbell Associates, the sole owner of the firm's Nevada company, belonged 45 percent to Mossack, 45 percent to Fonseca and 10 percent to Christoph Zollinger; no registry record of Tornbell's shareholders is retained. Zollinger denied being a shareholder, and Mossack had declared under oath that the firm did not control the Nevada company's internal affairs or day-to-day operations and that the two were not in a parent-subsidiary relationship. ^{18 19}

analysisIn February 2017 Panama's Attorney General, as the investigative journalism consortium reported, alleged that the firm's companies had been used for bribes in the Lava Jato affair and ordered Mossack's arrest on money-laundering charges; according to an online encyclopedia he was jailed on 10 February and released on 21 April 2017 on $500,000 bail after a judge found that he had cooperated. He denied wrongdoing, according to the investigative journalism consortium; in a notebook in his cell he wrote that the prosecutors were 'trying to obtain evidence for a crime that does not exist', and in June 2018 he and Fonseca issued a press release saying that the firm, its employees and its founders were 'never involved in unlawful acts'. A Panamanian news website reported that on 28 June 2024 he was among 28 defendants acquitted in the joined Lava Jato and Panama Papers case, and the judiciary's 2026 notice confirms acquittal judgment No. 03 of that date. A further Panamanian news website reported that on 10 August 2026 the appeal court upheld his acquittal in both files, No. 48931-19 and No. 87256-19; the judiciary's own notice gives no names. ^{1 2 3 4 5 6}

analysisThe investigative journalism consortium reported in 2018 that he remained under investigation in Cologne as an accessory to tax evasion, and another German newspaper traced that investigation to a CD of the firm's data bought by the tax authorities of North Rhine-Westphalia, without saying when it was opened. According to an online encyclopedia, Cologne prosecutors issued an international arrest warrant for him on 20 October 2020 on charges including accessory to tax evasion and forming a criminal organisation. A local-history wiki notes that Panama does not in principle extradite its own citizens, so he remains free as long as he stays in Panama. These are encyclopedia and press accounts; no German court decision concerning him is in the retained records. Court papers of October 2019 quoted by an online encyclopedia described him and Fonseca as subjects of an FBI investigation in the Southern District of New York; no U.S. charge against them is retained. ^{2 7 8 4 9}