Panamanian prosecutors raided the offices of Mossack Fonseca, the law firm at the center of the "Panama Papers" scandal, seeking possible links to Brazilian engineering company Odebrecht, the attorney general's office said on Thursday.
The law firm - Mossack Fonseca - central to the Panama Papers revelation last year have been arrested, according to a report in The Guardian.
According to the report, Panamanian prosecutors raided the offices of Mossack Fonseca, seeking possible links to Brazilian engineering company Odebrecht, the attorney general's office said on Thursday.
"Raid of offices of law firm that created limited liability companies in Brazil linked to #LavaJato #PanamaPapers," the attorney general's office said on Twitter, without providing more details.
The Guardian said that the founders - Juergen Mossack and his colleague Ramon Fonseca - were taken into custody and then transferred to police cells in the capital for further questioning on Friday. The publication was quoting their defence attorney Elias Solano.
The Panama Papers, which consist of millions of documents stolen from Mossack Fonseca and leaked to the media in April 2016, provoked a global scandal after showing how the rich and powerful used offshore corporations to evade taxes.
A car from the Attorney Generals Office is seen outside Mossack Fonseca law firm office during a raid for the Odebrecht corruption case in Panama City, Panama February 9, 2017. Image source: Reuters
Ramon Fonseca, a partner at Mossack Fonseca, denied that his firm had a connection to Odebrecht, which has admitted to bribing officials in Panama and other countries to obtain government contracts in the region between 2010 and 2014.
"Mossack Fonseca has no relationship with Odebrecht, nor with any other Lava Jato company," Fonseca told reporters, referring to companies involved in the so-called Lava Jato probe centered on Brazil's state-run oil company Petróleo Brasileiro SA.
"They're using me to divert attention," he said.
Fonseca also accused Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela of directly receiving money from Odebrecht, Latin America's largest engineering company.
"He (Varela) told me that he had accepted donations from Odebrecht because he could not fight with everyone," Fonseca said, without giving more details. Fonseca is a former advisor to Varela.
At a media conference, Varela denied he received donations from Odebrecht, saying he would make all donations to his political campaign public on Friday.
Odebrecht did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
(With Reuters)
(This article has not been edited by DNA's editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)
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