A key member of Fifa’s powerful ethics committee, which is supposed to be spearheading reform at world football’s scandal-hit governing body, acted as a lawyer for individuals and companies recently charged with bribery and corruption.
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Their companies were harboured by the Seychelles, the British Virgin Islands, Panama and other jurisdictions. Twenty-three individuals who have had sanctions imposed on them for supporting the regimes in North Korea, Zimbabwe, Russia, Iran and Syria have been clients of Mossack Fonseca.The families of at least eight current and former members of China’s supreme ruling body, the politburo, have been found to have hidden wealth offshore.In the UK, six members of the House of Lords, three former Conservative MPs and dozens of donors to British political parties have had offshore assets.Among national leaders with offshore wealth are Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister Ayad Allawi, ex-interim prime minister and former vice-president of Iraq Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine Alaa Mubarak, son of Egypt’s former president and the prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson.Some of it ends up in a ski resort where in 2013 Putin’s daughter Katerina got married. The Russian president’s best friend – a cellist called Sergei Roldugin - is at the centre of a scheme in which money from Russian state banks is hidden offshore. A $2bn trail leads all the way to Vladimir Putin.Twelve national leaders are among 143 politicians, their families and close associates from around the world known to have been using offshore tax havens.Though there is nothing unlawful about using offshore companies, the files raise fundamental questions about the ethics of such tax havens – and the revelations are likely to provoke urgent calls for reforms of a system that critics say is arcane and open to abuse.
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The records were obtained from an anonymous source by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with the Guardian and the BBC.