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Wonder what they will find

Federal agents and prosecutors are "chomping at the bit" to exploit the Panama Papers and launch prosecutions, a senior federal law enforcement official told NBC News -- but want to be sure that the way the huge data dump about offshore money was obtained doesn't jeopardize their cases.

"It is a bonanza," the official said in reference to the cache of 11 million financial documents about shell companies that a Panamanian law firm set up for some of the world's shadiest and most powerful people.

"It will keep a lot of agents very busy for a very long time," the official told NBC News. "They will be following the leads and figuring out who is trying to hide stuff illegally - money and also illegal activities."

Under the auspices of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, more than 300 journalists around the world have used the leaked documents -- a trove more than 1,000 times larger than the original Wikileaks document dump -- to do a series of stories on how the shell companies have been used to hide all sorts of criminal activity and efforts to avoid taxes.

The official, who is familiar with ongoing discussions about the document trove, said agents from every three-letter agency are lining up to crunch the data to bolster existing cases and build new ones against organized crime syndicates, drug cartels, foreign corrupt and kleptocratic regimes and even suspected Hezbollah terror cells in Latin America and possibly the U.S. That includes the FBI, the IRS and other Treasury agents, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

more http://www.nbcnews.c.....ls-n553396

lol, I wonder if anyone is actually going to contact them

U.S. officials revealed to NBC News that they have taken part in two global meetings about the Panama Papers to plan how to use the huge trove of leaked documents to catch criminals — and urged Americans to come clean now before illegal activity is discovered.

Last week's discussions in Paris and Washington between IRS and Treasury officials and their counterparts from around the world are the first evidence of U.S. involvement in the growing international coalition eager to analyze and use the data about more than 214,000 offshore companies listed by Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.

In a statement to NBC News, the IRS acknowledged participating in a "special project meeting" of JITSIC, the Joint International Tax Shelter Information and Collaboration network, about the papers in Paris last week.

The IRS also encouraged any U.S. citizens and companies that may have money in offshore accounts to contact the agency now before any possible illegal activity on their part is identified. According to media reports, the documents contain information on potentially thousands of U.S. citizens and firms that have at least an indirect connection to offshore accounts affiliated with Mossack Fonseca. Many other firms provide similar services, and the Treasury Departmentestimated last year that more than $300 billion dollars of illicit proceeds are generated in the United States annually, with criminals using such companies here and abroad to launder funds.

more http://www.nbcnews.c.....rs-n557246