Mossack Fonseca och CIA

En aspekt av Panamapappren som inte uppmärksammats i Sverige är att advokatfirman Mossack Fonseca använts av CIA för att dölja finansieringen av olagliga operationer. Exempelvis användes firman för att dölja försäljningen av vapen till Iran på 1980-talet för att få sju tillfångatagna US-amerikaner frisläppta. Pengarna överfördes senare till contras i Nicaragua som USA backade upp för att störta landets vänsterregering. Affären kallas Iran-Contras-affären.

I överföringen av vapnen var en av de största bidragsgivarna till Bill Clintons presidentvalskampanjer och till Hilary Clintons senatsvalskampanjer inblandad. Hans namn var Farhad Azima och via affärer som gjorde upp via Mossack Fonseca användes hans flygplan för att transportera vapnen:

The secret documents show that Farhad Azima incorporated his first offshore company with Mossack Fonseca in the BVI in 2000. The company was called ALG (Asia & Pacific) Limited, a branch of his airline Aviation Leasing Group, a U.S.-based private company with a fleet of more than 60 aircraft.

It was not until 2013 when the firm ran a routine background search on the shareholders of a new company that Mossack Fonseca discovered media articles on Azima’s alleged ties to the CIA. Among the allegations found in online articles shared by Mossack Fonseca employees were that he “supplied air and logistical support” to a company owned by former CIA agents who shipped arms to Libya. Another article quoted an FBI official who said he had been warned by the CIA that Azima was “off limits.”

The firm asked Azima’s representatives to confirm his identity. But it appears that Mossack Fonseca never received a reply. The files indicate that he remained a client and that internal surprises continued.

In 2014, one year after discovering online reports of his connections to the CIA, Hosshang Hosseinpour, was cited by the U.S. Treasury Department as helping companies move tens of millions of dollars for companies in Iran, which at the time was subject to economic sanctions.

The files show that Azima and Hosseinpour appeared on corporate documents of a company that planned to buy a hotel in the nation of Georgia in 2011. That was the same year Treasury officials asserted that Hosseinpour, who co-founded the private airline FlyGeorgia, and two others first began to send millions of dollars into Iran, which led to sanctions being taken against him three years later.

The documents show that Hosseinpour briefly held shares in the company from November 2011. However, in February 2012 company administrators told Mossack Fonseca that he was not part of the company and his shares had been issued in an “administrative error.” The company, Eurasia Hotel Holdings Limited, changed its name to Eurasia Aviation Holdings and bought a Hawker Beechcraft 400XP corporate jet in 2012 for $1.625 million, files show.

Azima told ICIJ that the company was only used to buy an aircraft and that Hosseinpour had never been involved in the company.

The plane was not going to be used in the U.S., Azima said, so couldn’t be registered in the U.S. and the choice of the BVI was not for tax purposes. “I’ve filed every tax known to mankind,” Azima told ICIJ.

Även Adnan Khashoggi, en saudirabaisk miljardär, som var inblandad i Iran-Contras-affären, gjorde upp affärer med CIA via advokatfirman i Panama. Han ska ha sålt vapen till Iran på 1970-talet och hade en rad bolga som Mossack Fonseca satt upp där han gjorde olika affärer från 1980-talet och framåt till år 2003 med bl.a. CIA. Adnan Khashoggi var också en av dem som hjälpte diktatorn på Filippinerna, Ferdinand Marcos, att försnilla och stjäla miljoner.

Dessa personer är dock bara toppen av ett isberg.

Mossack Fonseca är en firma som använts av CIA för att dölja affärer med vapensmugglare och knarkhandlare, dölja betalningar till angivare och spioner, ge agenter och spioner hemliga identiteter och täckföretag med mera. Det finns 100-tals dokument bland Panamapappren som handlar om sådant:

The documents also pull back the curtain on hundreds of details about how former CIA gun-runners and contractors use offshore companies for personal and private gain. Further, they illuminate the workings of a host of other characters who used offshore companies during or after their work as spy chiefs, secret agents or operatives for the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

“You can’t exactly walk around saying that you’re a spy,” Loch K. Johnson, a professor at the University of Georgia, says in explaining the cover that offshore firms offer. Johnson, a former aide to a U.S. Senate committee’s intelligence inquiries, has spent decades studying CIA “front” companies.

The documents reveal that Mossack Fonseca’s clients included Saudi Arabia’s first intelligence chief who was named by a U.S. Senate committee as the CIA’s “principal liaison for the entire the Middle East from the mid-1960’s through 1979,” Sheikh Kamal Adham, who controlled offshore companies later involved in a U.S. banking scandal. Also found in the files are Colombia’s former chief of air intelligence, ret. Maj. Gen. Ricardo Rubianogroot, who was a shareholder of an aviation and logistics company, and Brig. Gen. Emmanuel Ndahiro, doctor turned spy chief to Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame.

Adham died in 1999. Ndahiro did not respond to requests for comment. Rubianogroot confirmed to ICIJ partner and Colombian investigative journalism organization, Consejo de Redacción, that he was a small shareholder in West Tech Panama, which was created to buy an American avionics company. The company is in liquidation.

En av de vapenhandlare som CIA hade kontakt med var islänningen Loftur Johannesson. Johannesson ska på 1970- och 1980-talen ha sålt vapen till talibaner i Afghanistan för USA:s räkning. För de stor pengar han tjänade på utbetalningarna från CIA köpte han bl.a. ett hus på Barbados och en vingård i Frankrike. Johannesson själv dyker dock upp i Fonsecas papper först år 2002 då han använder dem för att dölja inkomster och sitt ägande av flera mycket värdefulla fastigheter.

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