Panama Papers, wife take down PM
Iceland’s Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson became the first major casualty of the Panama Papers revelations, stepping down yesterday after leaked files showed his wife owned an offshore firm with big claims on the country’s collapsed banks.
The ruling Progressive Party’s deputy leader, Sigurdur Ingi Johannsson, who holds the fisheries and agriculture portfolio, said Gunnlaugsson was resigning.
The leaked documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which specialises in setting up offshore companies, have shone a light on the finances of politicians and public figures from around the world, causing public outrage over how the powerful are able to hide money and avoid tax.
An Iceland government spokesman has said the claims against Iceland’s collapsed banks held by the firm owned by the prime minister’s wife – in which he also temporarily held a stake – totalled more than 500 million Icelandic crowns (NZ$5.98 million). Gunnlaugson has said his wife’s assets were taxed in Iceland.
His decision to step down came after thousands of Icelanders gathered in front of parliament on Tuesday, demanding the departure of the leader of the CentreRight coalition government, which has been in power since 2013.
Gunnlaugsson’s opponents say he should have been open about the overseas assets and the company, and he had a conflict of interest because the government is involved in striking deals with claimants against the bankrupt banks.
Iceland’s main commercial banks collapsed as the global financial crisis hit in 2008 and many Icelanders have blamed the North Atlantic island nation’s politicians for not reining in the banks’ debt-fuelled binge and averting a deep recession.
Meanwhile, Gianni Infantino, the new president of world football organisation Fifa, denied wrongdoing after documents with his signature surfaced among those leaked from Mossack Fonseca.
They show Infantino signed a Champions League television rights deal in 2006 with two Argentine businessmen when he was legal director for Uefa. The deal was with Hugo and Mariano Jinkis, owners of a company called Cross Trading, who are under house arrest while fighting extradition to the United States for bribery.
The papers show they purchased three years’ of TV rights for US$111,000 (NZ$163,000), and almost immediately sold them on to the Ecuadorian TV station Teleamazonas for $311,170.
There is nothing in the papers to suggest Infantino or Uefa received or paid a bribe relating to the contract with Cross Trading or that Teleamazonas did so either. Uefa said the TV rights were awarded to Teleamazonas and Cross Trading ‘‘because they made the highest offer on the market’’.
It also emerged that close associates of Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-Right National Front, shifted money out of France using offshore companies.
Frederic Chatillon, a friend of Le Pen and head of the company that handled communications for her 2012 presidential bid, and Nicolas Crochet, the author of her economic manifesto that year, had created a ‘‘sophisticated offshore system’’ to spirit 275,000 (NZ$459,000) abroad in 2013 and 2014.