Doug Stanglin

USA TODAY

The "Panama Papers" scandal has claimed another victim — Spain's minister of Industry, Trade and Tourism resigned over charges of ties to a company in an offshore tax haven.

Interim minister Jose Manuel Soria denied any wrongdoing, but said he was stepping down to limit any damage to acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's caretaker government, the People's Party, which likely faces elections in June, Reuters reports.

“All political activity should be exemplary, including when it comes to providing explanations,” he said in an e-mailed statement Friday, Spanish newspaper El Mundo reports. “When that is not the case, you have to take responsibility accordingly.”

The government quickly accepted the resignation. "No one who has operated in tax havens may be in the government," Finance Minister Cristobal Montoro said, the newspaper reports.

The resignation comes 10 days after Iceland's prime minister, Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson, stepped aside following revelations stemming from the "Panama Papers" investigations that his family sheltered money offshore.

The investigations were triggered by the leak of millions of documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which has been the conduit for numerous offshore accounts set up by government officials, celebrities, sports figures and wealthy individuals worldwide. The leak, initially to the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, quickly spread to an international consortium of newspapers, including El Mundo.

The story behind the massive Panama Papers leak

The Spanish newspaper reported that a company owned by Soria and his brother used an offshore account until 2002, when he was mayor of Las Palmas, in the tax haven of Jersey, an independent island territory between Britain and France. The newspaper said the company's true ownership "remained camouflaged behind a network of front men created by a subsidiary ... based on the British island in the English Channel."

Soria initially denied the allegations, but backtracked after additional information surfaced, including a copy of a document signed by him with a financial services company in Jersey.