In its forty years of existence, Mossack Fonseca created 214,000 shell companies. Documents show that the firm registered most of these companies in other tax havens – most notably in the British Virgin Islands – making their real owners untraceable through public records. These offshore companies held accounts in European banks – a popular model in the financial secrecy industry, as more recent journalistic investigations have also shown.

Why go through the trouble? A common claim by users of offshore companies is that they do so out of privacy concerns. But, as the Panama Papers and subsequent investigations have demonstrated, these parallel structures all too often deliberately service the needs of those who wish to conceal conflicts of interest, pay bribes, avoid sanctions, cheat tax collectors and launder money.

Behind the shell companies set up by Mossack Fonseca hid at least 140 politicians and public officials, including 12 government leaders, former or at the time. There were also 33 individuals or companies who had been blacklisted and sanctioned by the US government for money laundering, trafficking, terrorism and fraud.

The company’s founders had used an analogy to justify their business model: just as a car manufacturer cannot be held liable if their product is used to commit robberies, Mossack Fonseca was not accountable for the possible crimes committed using the financial vehicles it provided to individuals and corporations.

That was not entirely true, however. While offshore company formation is a legal business, leaked emails seen by the investigative journalists exposed how the company dealt with known criminals, backdated documents and obscured evidence.

The second leak of the Mossack Fonseca documents in August 2018 showed just how much the company scrambled to cover up violations of beneficial ownership transparency rules in the immediate aftermath of the scandal, Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko among them.

While the initial investigations into Mossack Fonseca by Panamanian authorities did not go far, in 2017 the firm’s two founders were arrested in Panama in connection to the Lava Jato corruption scandal, as part of an ongoing joint investigation with Brazilian prosecutors. In December 2018, the US authorities also charged four former employees of the firm.

European banks, who moved the dirty money of companies set up by Mossack Fonseca, are also increasingly being held liable for violating national and international anti-money laundering rules. Germany’s biggest bank, Deutsche Bank, which held accounts of shell companies owned by the convicted former Prime Minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif and his daughter, was raided in November 2018.