In Iceland, Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson resigned after formally asking President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson to dissolve Parliament and call new elections in the event of a government crisis. The decision came following the revelations of the "Panama Papers", involving the now ex prime minister and his wife. Although his guilt in the crime of tax fraud remains to be proven, over 24 Icelanders took to the streets and signed a petition calling for Gunlaugsson's resignation. The opposition had announced a motion of no confidence by the end of the week.
Meanwhile, two Marine Le Pen loyalists are also among the clients of the Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca, director of a network of offshore structures aimed at hiding financial wealth from all over the world. It is a tile of considerable political weight that fell yesterday on the head of the leader of the Front National, known for her invectives against "globalized finance, which damages the general interest of the Community", as she said a year ago commenting on "Swissleaks", an investigation on a huge tax evasion scheme promoted by the HSBC bank through its Swiss subsidiary. According to what was revealed by Le Monde, which participates with its journalists in the global investigation into the Panama Papers, among those who have used the services of the Panamanian law firm also include the entrepreneur Frédéric Chatillon and the expert accountant Nicolas Crochet, both already under investigation into alleged irregularities in the financing of the French far-right party's election campaigns in 2012.
Le Monde speaks of a "sophisticated offshore system between Hong Kong, Singapore, the British Virgin Islands and Panama" aimed at "draining money out of France through screen companies and fake invoices with the intention of escaping the French anti-money laundering service". At the center of the network, Frédéric Chatillon, former leader of a far-right student group and friend of Marine Le Pen since his university days in the early 2012s. His company, Riwal, deals with the electoral communication of the Front National, exclusively for the 2012 presidential and parliamentary campaigns. Crochet drafted Le Pen's economic program for the XNUMX presidential elections.
Chatillon, who among other things is very often in Rome, together with Crochet, in 2012 allegedly carried out a round of false invoices and offshore companies to get 316 thousand euros owned by Riwal out of France and reinvest them in a friend's company based in Singapore . In addition to the shadows over Marine, the scandal looms even more concretely over the founder of the Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who, again according to Le Monde, through the offshore company Balerton Marketing Limited, created in secret in the Caribbean in the 2000s, has hidden a real own "treasure", made out to the front name Gerald Gerin, his former butler: banknotes, bonds, ingots and other pieces of gold. Together with the French trend, news of the day, various countries are coming to terms with the 'national' declinations of the story.
Finally, in Great Britain, the British Prime Minister David Cameron - interviewed on his family assets, after the name of his father Ian appeared in the scandal of the "Panama Papers" - defended himself by stating that he "has no offshore fund, no shares, no offshore trusts, none of that. I have the prime minister's salary - he said - and I have money aside on which I receive interest. And I have a house that we live in but it's currently rented out because we're in Downing Street and that's all I have."
And if in Moscow the spokesman of the Kremlin Dmitri Peskov has returned to speak of an "orchestrated attack against President Vladimir Putin", according to the Chinese state press behind the Panama Papers there are hostile Western forces and the country's media have received tout court the order to avoid reporting the involvement of President Xi Jinping's family and Communist Party leaders in the scandal. While it emerges that the Mossack Fonseca studio has eight offices in China: more than in any other country.
