According to the International Consortium of International Journalists (ICIJ), the new documents reveal details of swollen bank accounts and offshore assets of political figures accused of statewide looting.
ICIJ said: “In March 2017, Mossack Fonseca discovered that a company it had registered in the British Virgin Islands was owned by Mohamed Nizam Abdul Razak, the brother of Malaysia’s former prime minister, Najib Razak.
“The company, Everbright Universal Holdings Ltd, owned property in the US, according to the files.”
It said calls to Nizam’s phone number went unanswered, and his Credit Suisse banker did not respond to ICIJ’s emails.
The ICIJ report, however, did not accuse Nizam of any wrongdoing.
ICIJ noted that Najib, whose Barisan Nasional was defeated in the May 9 general election, is under probe over billions of dollars found missing from 1MDB.
The Malaysian Parliamentary Accounts Committee investigating 1MDB said in a report released in 2016 that 1MDB sent a total of US$3.5 billion to “Aabar BVI” which was registered in the British Virgin Islands.
What happened to the money after it went to the British Virgin Islands could not be determined, the report said.
This became an issue when Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, International Petroleum Investment Co (IPIC), and its subsidiary Aabar Investments PJS, said the BVI firm with an almost identical name, Aabar Investments PJS Ltd, “was not an entity within either corporate group”. IPIC said it had not received any payments from the BVI company and had not assumed any liabilities on its behalf.
IPIC took 1MDB and the finance ministry to court for arbitration in 2016 but in 2017, Malaysia agreed to settle the dispute and pay up the money owed.
A focal point of the current investigation by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission is the RM2.6 billion that was transferred into a bank account owned by Najib. However, Najib has denied any wrongdoing.
ICIJ revealed in the original Panama Papers that Najib’s son Mohd Nazifuddin owned two offshore companies.
According to ICIJ, the documents also showed Mossack Fonseca scrambling to contain the fallout from the leak and identifying its own clients.
The 1.2 million documents date from a few months before April 2016, when ICIJ and more than 100 media partners published the initial Panama Papers stories, and continue through December 2017. The documents were leaked to Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared them with ICIJ.
Mossack Fonseca’s founders, Jurgen Mossack and Ramon Fonseca, issued a press release in June that said the law firm, its employees and its founders were “never involved in unlawful acts”.
ICIJ said they did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
“In the coming days, ICIJ partners in dozens of countries will publish stories based on the new batch of Panama Papers files. Those stories will shed new light on the financial dealings of people from the first investigation and connect other influential and politically connected people to the firm.”
ICIJ said among those whose names were mentioned in the documents were football star Lionel, who is under investigation in Spain on charges that he and his father, Jorge Horacio Messi, used offshore companies in Belize and Uruguay to avoid paying millions of dollars in taxes.
The Panama Papers revealed they owned yet another offshore company, Mega Star Enterprises, based in Panama.
When asked about the company in April 2016, the Messis told ICIJ and partners that Mega Star was “totally inactive”. Internal emails from the newly leaked Mossack Fonseca records call that claim into question.
According to the ICIJ report, the latest documents show that Mossack Fonseca resigned as the registered agent for Mega Star Enterprises in July 2016, the same month the Messis were convicted by a Spanish court of tax fraud. Lionel was given a 21-month suspended sentence and fined US$2.2 million.
Others named in the documents included the family of Argentine president Mauricio Macri and Fahad al-Rajaan, the former head of the agency that oversees Kuwait’s social security system. Al-Rajaan was convicted in absentia in 2016 of embezzling up to US$390 million.