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Bernie Sanders speaks during a campaign event on April 4, 2016, in Milwaukee. | AP Photo Sanders hits Clinton over Panama Papers leaks

Responding to the 11.5 million documents leaked this week showing how a Panama law firm helped some of the world's wealthiest people establish offshore tax havens on the Central American country — the so-called Panama Papers — Bernie Sanders on Tuesday vowed to end the Panama Free Trade Agreement, tying Hillary Clinton to the same policies that he claimed fostered the practice.

“The Panama Free Trade Agreement put a stamp of approval on Panama, a world leader when it comes to allowing the wealthy and the powerful to avoid taxes," the Vermont senator said in a statement released through his campaign, adding that he has been opposed to it "from day one."

Vowing to use his authority as president to "terminate the Panama Free Trade Agreement within six months," Sanders said his administration would "conduct an immediate investigation into U.S. banks, corporations and wealthy individuals who have been stashing their cash in Panama to avoid taxes."

"If any of them have violated U.S. law, my administration will prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law," he said.

Sanders also said that he had correctly predicted that the passage of the trade deal "would make it easier, not harder, for the wealthy and large corporations to evade taxes by sheltering billions of dollars offshore."

"I wish I had been proven wrong about this, but it has now come to light that the extent of Panama’s tax avoidance scams is even worse than I had feared," he said, before pivoting to Clinton. “My opponent, on the other hand, opposed this trade agreement when she was running against Barack Obama for president in 2008. But when it really mattered she quickly reversed course and helped push the Panama Free Trade Agreement through Congress as Secretary of State. The results have been a disaster."

The leak of the documents, internal files from law firm Mossack Fonseca, to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists represents the largest such event in history, far surpassing past the volume of documents given to journalists by Edward Snowden in 2013. The prime minister of Iceland resigned Tuesday after the documents showed his hidden assets.