Ramón Fonseca Mora

attributedFrom April 2016 about 11.5 million internal legal and financial documents of Mossack Fonseca, published mainly through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) as the Panama Papers, became the basis of worldwide reporting on offshore companies. ^{6 14}

qualification

The leaked documents are not part of the retained evidence.

response

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.

attributedPanamanian authorities raided Mossack Fonseca in 2016 and 2017; a Panamanian newspaper reported that the first raid on its headquarters came ten days after the Panama Papers were published, and a financial-crime law blog reported that the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York announced an investigation. In February 2017 Panama's Attorney General, Kenia Porcell, alleged that Mossack Fonseca companies had been used to make and receive bribes in connection with the Lava Jato ('Car Wash') scandal, called the firm 'a criminal organization that is dedicated to hiding money assets from suspicious origins' and ordered the arrest of Mossack and Fonseca on money-laundering charges. Both were jailed on 10 February 2017 and released on 21 April 2017 on bail of $500,000 each, after a judge ruled that they had cooperated with the investigation. ^{1 2 3 4}

qualification

The Attorney General's statements are allegations; they are reported by the investigative journalism consortium, and the arrest dates by an online encyclopedia.

response

According to the investigative journalism consortium, the two men denied wrongdoing. In a notebook in his jail cell Mossack wrote that the prosecutors were 'trying to obtain evidence for a crime that does not exist', and in June 2018 the two lawyers issued a press release saying that the firm, its employees and its founders were 'never involved in unlawful acts'.

attributedA further Panamanian news website reported on 13 August 2026 that the appeal judgment (second-instance judgment No. 12 of 10 August 2026) upheld the acquittal of Jürgen Rolf Dieter Mossack Herzog in both files, No. 48931-19 (Lava Jato) and No. 87256-19 (Panama Papers), after rejecting the arguments of the Second Specialised Prosecutor's Office against Organised Crime; for Ramón Enrique de Jesús Fonseca Mora, whose criminal action had been declared extinguished by his death, the outcome is legally not an acquittal. ⁷

qualification

Newspaper report of the appeal judgment, which the judiciary's own notice summarises without names.

attributedAccording to an online encyclopedia, prosecutors in Cologne, Germany, issued international arrest warrants for Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca on 20 October 2020 on charges including accessory to tax evasion and forming a criminal organisation, with the firm central to the investigation; the charges against Fonseca were dropped when he died in May 2024. A local-history wiki adds that, because Panama does not in principle extradite its own citizens, Mossack remains free as long as he stays in Panama. The investigative journalism consortium reported in June 2018 that Mossack remained under investigation by the Cologne prosecutors as an accessory to tax evasion, according to a statement provided to a German newspaper; another German newspaper wrote that the Cologne investigation of Mossack and Fonseca for suspected aiding of tax evasion had been opened after the tax authorities of North Rhine-Westphalia bought a CD of the firm's data for nearly one million euros, and that it had nothing to do with the Panama Papers. ^{2 5 8 4 9}

qualification

Encyclopedia and press accounts; the retained records contain no German court decision concerning Mossack, and another German newspaper page, dated 15 November 2018, does not say when the investigation was opened.