April 14, 2016
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday acknowledged the authenticity of recent disclosures about offshore companies owned by prominent Russians, including one of his oldest friends, but said they were not proof of any wrongdoing.
Putin, in a nearly four-hour question-and-answer session, also took aim at the international team of journalists that produced the Panama Papers report detailing shell companies, tax havens and financial dealings by political figures and others around the world.
He claimed that news reports on the trove of leaked documents, from the law firm Mossack Fonseca, were an attempt to “muddy the waters” at the behest of the U.S. government and New York-based investment bank Goldman Sachs, but he gave no details to back up his assertions.
“First of all, however strange it may seem, the information is accurate,” he said, referring to what was in the leak. He also claimed that Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Munich-based newspaper that first published the leaks, was part of a media holding owned by Goldman Sachs, implying that the bank paid for the articles.