CITY OF PANAMA.- The trial for the Lava Jato case in Panama, which involves the defunct Mossack Fonseca law firm, epicenter of the Panama Papers scandal, It will begin this Monday with 32 defendants for money laundering and after a long and bumpy road.
“Everything is ready for the alternate ordinary hearing of the ‘Lava Jato’ case”indicated the Judicial Branch in a letter, in which it recalled that the investigation began in 2016 due to news events related to that operation in Brazil, “which allegedly linked a law office in Panama dedicated to the creation of corporations.”
Ramón Fonseca Mora, co-founder with Jürgen Mossack of the epicenter of the Papales scandal in Panama, confirmed to EFE that both are called to this trial, which, he reiterated, is “political.”
“We have a letter from the ‘Lava Jato’ judge in Brazil who says that we were not even named in that trial. Here they used headlines from La Prensa, a yellow newspaper, to accuse us,” he said.
Hundreds of media outlets published in April 2016 more than 11.5 million documents from the Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca that revealed that personalities from all over the world hired the firm’s services to manage their wealth through offshore or extraterritorial companies. and allegedly evade taxes.
The company, founded in 1977 and considered at the time a leading player in the creation of offshore companies, once had more than a thousand employees in dozens of offices around the world, but ended up closing in March 2018.
Fonseca Mora has maintained that his law firm did not do “anything illegal in its 40 years of existence,” and has subordinated the accusations against him to economic and political interests.
DISMISSAL AND SUBSEQUENT CHALLENGE
The trial for the “Lava Jato” case was scheduled for last May, but it was suspended due to the fact that a lawyer presented a medical disability, according to official information, so the proceeding was left for the alternate date of between 26 June and July 7.
The hearing, in charge of the Superior Court for Settlement of Criminal Cases presided over by Judge Baloísa Marquínez, will have nine private defenders, and in the case of the absence of any of them, already “the court has appointed seven alternate public defenders in order to guarantee the right of defense”, stated the Judicial Branch.
Last October, Judge Marquínez herself, as head of the Third Settlement Court, issued the “provisional dismissal in favor of 39 people, and a definitive dismissal for another” for the “Lava Jato” case.
He argued, among others, that the investigation “did not show which accounts were created in Panama for the purpose of hiding money of illicit origin, nor the amounts of money received from offshore” or extraterritorial companies.
But last October, a higher court modified the dismissal ruling and opened criminal proceedings against 32 people in response to an appeal by the Public Ministry (MP, Prosecutor’s Office).
