One of Central America’s most prestigious law firms, Alemán, Cordero, Galindo & Lee, was going into damage control mode, again.
The United States had accused managers of a private European bank of accepting exorbitant commissions to help clients launder $4.2 billion in looted money. Those clients included former high-ranking officials of Venezuela’s national oil company, an institution rife with corruption in a country in chaos, along with others with close government ties.
The firm, known as Alcogal, had cause to be alarmed: Some of the Venezuelans involved in the scandal were its customers, too. It had set up offshore shell companies for them.
Following a well-worn playbook, the Panamanian firm quickly assembled a team to handle the emergency and decided to resign as registered agent for many of the companies. Driving the decision: “The impact of the negative news” and “the level of risk that these companies represent due to the people that are part of them,” according to an internal Spanish-language report from 2015.
For a high-powered law firm that represents the likes of Citibank and Pfizer, creating companies for former members of the Venezuelan government might be considered too great of a risk of inadvertently aiding money laundering.
But Alcogal didn’t come to play a leading role in the tax avoidance and asset protection industry by turning risky clients away.
Alcogal has served figures involved in some of the most notorious corruption scandals in recent Latin American history
Over the past three decades, Alcogal has become a magnet for the rich and powerful from Latin America and beyond seeking to hide wealth offshore, a massive new leak of corporate records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists shows. The records are known as the Pandora Papers.
The firm acted as corporate middleman for more than 160 politicians and public officials, the records show. Its client roster has included Panamanian presidents, a leading presidential contender in next month’s Honduran election, the president of Ecuador and even the king of Jordan.
All told, nearly half of the politicians whose names appear in the leaked records were tied to Alcogal.