The prime minister of Iceland resigned Tuesday as the weekend exposé of off-shore tax matters found in the so-called “Panama Papers” claimed its first major casualty.
The year-long investigation carried out by 370 journalists of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists was prompted by a document leak from the files of Mossack Fonseca. ICIJ is a project of the Center for Public Integrity. Their work with the leaked information has revealed secret dealings across the planet by politicians, plutocrats and assorted other palm-greasers. Panama-based Mossack Fonseca is heavily engaged in setting up shell companies in tax havens around the world, places where these one percenters can stash their wealth without fear of discovery. Or so they thought.
The exposé generated the greatest uproar in Iceland since the Bárðarbunga volcano erupted in 2014. In the case of Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, the protests arose over revelations in the papers that he and his wife owned a secretive British Virgin Islands-based investment company—Wintris Inc.—that held millions of dollars in claims against the nation’s failed banks.
The bank collapse eight years ago resulted in several executives being sentenced to prison terms. Gunnlaugsson sold his 50 percent share in Wintris to his wife in 2009 eight months after he was elected to parliament. But he failed to disclose interest in the firm then or in 2013 when he became prime minister. In that role, he was party to negotiations with three of the banks that failed in the worldwide financial crisis of 2008. Although no evidence of criminal behavior has been alleged—the former prime minister claimed the failure to disclose was a simple accounting mistake—protesters say that Gunnlaugsson’s holdings created serious conflicts of interest.
The leftwing parliamentary opposition to Gunnlaugsson’s center-right coalition government had presented a motion of no-confidence Monday. Sigurður Ingi Jóhannsson, Iceland’s agriculture and fisheries minister, is replacing Gunnlaugsson.
Meanwhile, like The Guardian and Süddeutsche Zeitung—which was the German paper an anonymous source leaked the documents to more than a year ago—the U.S.-based McClatchy Company has published several articles on the Panama Papers, with more certain to come. One of those stories notes that more than 200 passports of Americans are included in the massive leak.
When The Guardian and Süddeutsche Zeitung published their array of stories over the weekend, no Americans were included, something that spurred considerable speculation, including allegations of cover-ups by the media involved in the exposé. Although 107 media operations are involved in the project that is bringing what’s in the Panama Papers to light, McClatchy is the only U.S. newspaper company among them.