Nestled at the end of a row of sprawling waterfront estates in the suburbs of Montreal, a pale brick house sits empty, its mailbox overflowing with bills.

Through the front window, an unplugged stove is visible, abandoned in the middle of the living room floor. The leaves haven’t been raked. Waves crash against a crumbling concrete pier.

This house is one of the few physical traces left by a Quebec numbered company at the centre of a complex tax evasion scheme that used Canada to hide at least $3.1 million (U.S.) from three South American governments.

It is the address listed on public documents for the sole corporate director of 9203-9619 Quebec Inc.

But correspondence found in the Panama Papers, a leak of 11.5 million documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, shows that this person was simply a front man, paid $200 per month to keep the company’s real owners off public documents.

Reporting by the Star and CBC/Radio-Canada pieced together how 9203-9619 Quebec Inc. was a vehicle used by Peruvian lawyers to evade taxes by making it appear money was flowing to Canada.

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The path that dead ends at the abandoned Montreal house begins in Lima, Peru, with a man named Mauricio Munoz-Najar.

Once a top tax official under Peru’s strongman president Alberto Fujimori, Munoz-Najar was removed from office and convicted for corruption after the dictator fell in 2000.

Mauricio Munoz-Najar

After cutting a deal to avoid prison, Munoz-Najar reinvented himself as a tax consultant. Along with his brothers, Edgardo and Gonzalo, he ran Estudio Muñóz-Nájar Bustamante y Asociados, advising wealthy Peruvians and international corporations on how to minimize taxes.

Munoz-Najar purchased 9203-9619 Quebec Inc. through Mossack Fonseca shortly after the firm began marketing Canada as a tax haven in 2010.

The company did not conduct any business in Canada, the documents show. Instead, financial records show Mossack Fonseca arranged a paper trail of nearly identically worded contracts and invoices dating back to 2009 that give the appearance that money was flowing from companies in Peru, Ecuador and Chile into Canada.

It wasn’t.

But there was a good reason for making it look that way: tax treaties Canada has with those countries allow Canadian firms to not pay any taxes there — with the understanding the tax will be paid in Canada.

Yet 9203-9619 Quebec Inc. under-declared here as well, according to leaked financial records, deceiving tax authorities on both ends and playing the tax regimes off each other.

In the end, the company paid no taxes abroad and less than $6,000 into Canadian tax coffers on more than $3.1 million in transactions between 2009 and 2012, financial records show.

Repeated attempts to contact the Munoz-Najar brothers were unsuccessful.

Their names appear nowhere on the corporate registration of 9203-9619 Quebec Inc. Instead, there’s a long chain of intermediaries that make it nearly impossible to trace real ownership of the company without access to the confidential communications kept in the Panama Papers.

As far as Canadian public officials would be able to tell, all the company’s paperwork was filed by a lawyer named Claude Pellerin. What they didn’t know is that Pellerin acted as Mossack Fonseca’s local agent in Canada.

Montreal lawyer Claude Pellerin

Pellerin registered Canadian companies for Mossack Fonseca and allowed foreign clients — like the Munoz-Najars — to use his Montreal address as a corporate head office for $600 per year.

When contacted by the Star and Radio-Canada, Pellerin, who severed his ties with Mossack Fonseca in 2014, said he could not comment on specific files, but did not know the companies were used to avoid tax.

“Each time I open a company here, I advise the client that he must file his tax return, that he must declare his worldwide revenues, that the company is established here and that it has fiscal obligations to Canada and Quebec,” Pellerin said.

“After that, who runs the company and how, I cannot be responsible for that.”

Montreal accountant Manu Kakkar prepared the tax filings for 9203-9619 Quebec Inc. Email correspondence shows Kakkar was hired by Mossack Fonseca in 2012 to review the contracts and invoices, sign off on the company’s financial statements and file its taxes for the years 2009 and 2010.

In an email response to questions, Kakkar confirmed his role as the company’s accountant but would not discuss the company, saying he is “bound by both my Chartered Professional Accountancy code of client confidentiality as well as lawyer-client privilege.”

While the company paid $5,811.60 (Canadian) to the Canada Revenue Agency for contracts dated in 2010, it never filed again according to the Panama Papers files.

9203-9619 Quebec Inc. remains active on the Quebec corporate registry.

Toronto forensic accountant Charles Smedmor reviewed the company files and called them “amateurish.”

“The poor quality of the fabricated documents, especially when looking for the usual details contained in invoices, points to a scheme where no real effort was made to properly paper the file,” he said.