 "Panama, Panama Papers leak")
Over the years, William R Ponsoldt had earned tens of millions of dollars building a string of successful companies. He had renovated apartment buildings in the New York City area. Bred Arabian horses. Run a yacht club in the Bahamas, a rock quarry in Michigan, an auto-parts company in Canada, even a multibillion-dollar hedge fund.
Now, as he neared retirement, Ponsoldt, of Jensen Beach, Florida, had a special request for Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-based law firm well placed in the world of offshore finance: How could he confidentially shift his money into overseas bank accounts and use them to buy real estate and move funds to his children?
"He is the manager of one of the richest hedge funds in the world," a lawyer at Mossack Fonseca wrote when the firm was introduced to Ponsoldt in 2004. "Primary objective is to maintain the utmost confidentiality and ideally to open bank accounts without disclosing his name as a private person."
In summary, the firm explained: "He needs asset protection schemes, which we are trying to sell him."
Thus began a relationship that would last at least through 2015 as Mossack Fonseca managed eight shell companies and a foundation on the family's behalf, moving at least $134 million through seven banks in six countries - little of which could be traced directly to Ponsoldt or his children.
These transactions and others like them for a stable of wealthy clients from the United States are outlined in extraordinary detail in the trove of internal Mossack Fonseca documents known as the Panama Papers. The materials were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and have now been shared with The New York Times.
In recent weeks, the papers' revelations about Mossack Fonseca's international clientele have shaken the financial world. The Times's examination of the files found that Mossack Fonseca also had at least 2,400 United States-based clients over the past decade, and set up at least 2,800 companies on their behalf in the British Virgin Islands, Panama, the Seychelles and other jurisdictions that specialise in helping hide wealth.
Many of these transactions were legal; there are legitimate reasons to create offshore accounts, particularly when setting up a business overseas or buying real estate in a foreign country.
But the documents - confidential emails, copies of passports, ledgers of bank transactions and even the various code names used to refer to clients - show that the firm did much more than simply create offshore shell companies and accounts. For many of its American clients, Mossack Fonseca offered a how-to guide of sorts on skirting or evading United States tax and financial disclosure laws.
These included locating an individual from a "tax-convenient" jurisdiction to be the straw man owner of an offshore account, concealing the true American owner, or encouraging one client it knew was a United States resident to use his foreign passports to open accounts offshore, again to avoid scrutiny from regulators, the documents show.
If the compliance department at one foreign bank contacted by Mossack Fonseca on behalf of its clients started to ask too many questions about who owned the account, the firm simply turned to other, less inquisitive banks.
And even though the law firm said publicly that it would not work with clients convicted of crimes or whose financial activities raised "red flags," several individuals in the United States with criminal records were able to turn to Mossack Fonseca to open new companies offshore, the documents show.
©2016 The New York Times News Service
PORTFOLIO OF DOOM
8 shell companies and 1 foundation on behalf of Ponsoldt family run by Mossack Fonseca
$134 million were moved
7 banks in 6 countries were involved
