Above: Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko attends a parliament session before voting on a law to establish an anti-corruption court, Kyiv, June 2018. Credit: Valentyn Ogirenko / Reuters

Several weeks before the publication of the original Panama Papers investigation in April 2016, the Cyprus lawyers for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko were busy.

His representatives had received inquiries from reporters about an offshore company Poroshenko had set up to hold his vast candy empire. The British Virgin Islands (BVI) holding company, called Prime Asset Partners Ltd., would be outed in the published investigation.

Now, newly released Panama Papers documents show what Poroshenko’s lawyers were doing as the publication date approached — asking employees at Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm at the center of the leaks, to make changes in documents related to his firm.

The changes appear to have been designed to protect the president from criticism at home.

The aim of some was to remove Poroshenko from direct ownership of his BVI company. Others seemed to be an attempt to deal with the fact that he had failed to declare his ownership of the company twice — in his 2014 and 2015 mandatory income declarations. However, not all of the changes requested by Poroshenko’s lawyers were agreed to by Mossack Fonseca.

The new Mossack Fonseca documents were received by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). This data, collected after the release of the original investigations, sheds light on Poroshenko’s team’s attempts to control a story that was about to spin out of control.

The documents also show that, while the president claimed to have given up any direct control of his business, as it was put in trust, a close associate of his became the director of all three offshore companies involved.

A Big Commotion

As the Panama Papers exploded across the world in April 2016, the story about Poroshenko’s offshore company was one of its biggest revelations.

In a country that had recently deposed its previous president in part for his notorious corruption, Poroshenko understood that his ownership of Roshen, his massive candy and confectionery business, was a sensitive issue.

“If I get elected, I will wipe the slate clean and sell the Roshen concern,” he had told the German newspaper Bild during his electoral campaign. “As President of Ukraine I plan and commit to focus exclusively on welfare of the nation.”

Moreover, Ukrainian law at the time required him to transfer all his shares to independent managers within 10 days of the election.

But according to the leaked documents, in the months after becoming president in the summer of 2014, Poroshenko’s lawyers had established a BVI holding company to control Roshen — and the president was the new company’s sole shareholder.

After being contacted by reporters, Poroshenko’s people knew that at least some of this was about to become public.

This would be problematic for several reasons. The new offshore company was at odds with Poroshenko’s public statements. It was an apparent violation of the law. Furthermore, it raised the issue of whether the president was trying to avoid taxes by moving his company offshore.

After the story was published, Poroshenko’s lawyers and supporters spent months trying to convince voters that he had done nothing wrong. But their arguments were undermined by inconsistent stories and direct contradictions exposed by leaks and public records.

Responding to OCCRP’s initial questions about the BVI company in March 2016, Poroshenko’s lawyers first told reporters that the main purpose of establishing it was to make his confectionary business more attractive to potential buyers.

Then, after selling it for a good price began to seem less likely, they said they created the offshore structures to put his candy business into a Swiss “blind trust” that he would not control.

Representatives of the Zurich-based Rothschild Trust, a wealth management service provider, did confirm in April 2016 that it had been appointed to manage a trust to hold Poroshenko’s confectionary assets.

But little has been revealed about the terms of the trust agreement, specifically whether or not Poroshenko has kept any direct control over his companies. Repeated requests to Poroshenko and his lawyers to allow an independent analysis of the agreement for potential conflicts of interest have been left unanswered.