‘Hand over Panama Papers’

BERLIN: German Justice Minister Heiko Maas appealed in a newspaper interview to media to hand over the Panama Papers that show how offshore firms are used to stash the wealth of the world’s elite.

Governments around the globe have started investigating possible financial wrongdoing by the world’s rich and powerful since details of hundreds of thousands of clients were leaked from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, which has set up around 250,000 companies in the last four decades.

The scandal broke when an investigation was published last Sunday, with German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung saying it had received a cache of 11.5 million leaked documents from Mossack Fonseca and then shared them with more than 100 other international news outlets and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

Maas told German newspaper Tagesspiegel that tax investigators and lawyers in Germany were carefully looking at all clues related to reports on the Panama Papers and several investigations were already underway.