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The Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which is at the center of the Panama Papers leak, has threatened to sue the journalists who are publishing the documents that were hacked from the company's computers showing world leaders and celebrities using the firm’s legal services to avoid taxes using offshore companies.
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“Due to the way in which the media has fed from the information stolen from our system in order to disseminate out of context news and affect our reputation, we have been forced to take stronger actions,” The firm said in a statement Thursday, a day before the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released a database with 200,000 documents.
“Today we sent a cease and desist letter to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) regarding its announcement to make public, on May 9th, the second portion of the database stolen from our company.”
The company reiterated that it has committed any crimes and that all its activities and services are legal.
“It is important for us to make clear that we operate, in all jurisdictions, under strict compliance with the law and regulations of the industry in all services provided, respecting strong client identification norms.”
The statement says that journalists publishing the documents are in fact breaking the law because revealing such information is “a violation of the confidentiality agreement between attorney and client, which we must protect.”
Last month, In what is described as the biggest documents leak in the history of journalism, an unknown whistleblower exposed more than 11.5 million documents belonging to the Panamanian law firm. The documents were obtained by various news organizations and advocacy groups including ICIJ and The Guardian.
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