Insurance fraud and a deadly maritime disaster over a decade ago have surfaced as scrutiny intensifies of the much-discussed Panama Papers, the data dump of more than 11 million documents revealing the use of offshore accounts and shell companies by various high-profile individuals and organizations that has grabbed headlines since the data leak last weekend.
In 2005, twenty elderly tourists died when tour boat the
Ethan Allen sank in Lake George in upstate New York.
Survivors of those killed in the sinking were in for a nasty shock once they sued – it turned out the tour company had been paying premiums on a fake policy sold to it by con artists.
A measure of closure was reached in 2011 when an accountant resident on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts,
Malchus Irvin Boncamper, pled guilty in an American court to his part in helping the fraudsters launder their takings. Boncamper was a figure already known to Mossack Fonseca; in fact he had served as a “nominee” director -- essentially, as the front man -- for dozens of companies created by the now-disgraced law firm.
In the wake of Boncamper’s conviction, Mossack Fonseca moved to distance itself from the accountant, replacing him as director of the 30 companies he fronted – and altered records to make it seem the change had taken place up to a decade previously.
