Charges filed in Panama Papers case

Indictment says four men helped clients evade taxes offshore, then recover funds back in U.S.

NEW YORK — Federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed an indictment on Tuesday that contained the first charges brought in the United States in connection with the so-called Panama Papers leak.

The indictment, which a grand jury returned in late September, names four men connected to Mossack Fonseca, the shuttered offshore law firm whose activities were laid bare in the leak. The men were charged with tax fraud, money laundering and other crimes as part of alleged schemes that stretch back decades.

Three of the men — an American accountant, a German investment adviser and a German client — have been arrested. The fourth man, a Panamanian lawyer at the center of the accusations, remained at large.

The charges were the second law enforcement action in the past week that stemmed from the Panama Papers. The German police raided the headquarters of Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt on Thursday as part of an investigation into whether the bank helped criminals launder money through offshore tax havens.

The indictment, unsealed in the Southern District of New York, focuses on three advisers: Ramses Owens, a Panamanian lawyer at Mossack Fonseca; Dirk Brauer, a German investment adviser for Mossfon Asset Management, an asset management affiliated with the law firm; and Richard Gaffey, an American accountant in Boston.

According to the indictment, the men helped U.S. taxpayers evade taxes by using undisclosed foreign accounts and shell companies in places like the British Virgin Islands, Hong Kong and Panama. They also instructed them on how to repatriate those offshore funds to the United States while concealing them from the IRS.

Among the clients who participated in the scheme, prosecutors said, was Harald Joachim von der Goltz, an 81-year-old German citizen who lived in the United States and began a business relationship with Mossack Fonseca in the 1980s. According to federal prosecutors, he avoided taxes by claiming that accounts he failed to report to the IRS were owned by his 102-year-old mother.

The Panama Papers — millions of confidential documents from the Mossack Fonseca law firm — were first revealed in April 2016 through a collaboration between the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the nonprofit International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The documents shed light on the often illicit methods used by the wealthy and powerful to launder money, hide income and evade taxes through the use of offshore bank accounts and shell companies in island havens.