Economy

Why isn’t Mitt Romney’s shell company in the Panama Papers?

April 18, 2016

Mitt offshore — During the 2012 presidential campaign, Romney’s Bermuda shell company of a similar name received widespread press attention in the US press. But much less attention was paid to the context, that it was part of an international string of offshore shell companies, including this one. The Panama Papers have shed more light on how these schemes work, but those come from only one of many Panamanian law firms that set up these chains.

Mitt’s Panamanian shell

a note by Eric Jackson

One question that is frequently asked about the Panama Papers leak is why there aren’t more American names. At this point we don’t know. However, before jumping off into any conspiracy theories about who might be behind the transfer of all of those documents — or the motives of those playing roles in deciding which of the 11.5 million documents are published — we should understand a bit about this particular underworld. Mossack Fonseca is far from the only Panamanian law firm that organizes corporate shells, and that Panama is far from the only jurisdiction where this is done. These days those with the money, motives and morals to set up money laundering structures — do we want to use the euphemism “offshore asset protection” or some such? — tend to set up strings of shell companies that stretch across several jurisdictions. Mitt went to other law firms to set his shell game.