Billionaire Democratic financier George Soros established at least three offshore investment vehicles using a Panamanian law firm, according to documents reported on Monday.
The accounts established by Mossack Fonseca include Soros Finance, Inc., incorporated in Panama; Soros Holdings Limited in the British Virgin Islands; and a limited partnership called Soros Capital in Bermuda.
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The findings were included in the 11.5 million pages of documents leaked from the firm that are known as the Panama Papers. The documents were first revealed in April, but the first original copies were first published online May 9. Soros’ holdings were reported by Fox News on May 16.
The documents were first obtained and placed online by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2015, which is funded in part by Soros’ Open Society Institute. Soros gave ICIJ $1.5 million last year, but the group said it failed to notice his presence in the papers until now.
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“I suspect we would have more information [on Soros] because the public database … does not contain the underlying data,” Ryle said in an email to Fox, which has requested additional information.
The papers detail only a sliver of Soros’ offshore investments, which are held in the well-known Quantum Group of Funds. The Quantum network is not subject to U.S. law, but Soros was forced to disclose some information about the network as a result of buying firms regulated by the the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The offshore network is managed by the Manhattan-based Soros Fund Management LLC.
A spokesman for Soros declined to answer whether the offshore companies pay U.S. taxes. Though the practice of shielding wealth offshore is not always illegal, the Democratic recipients of Soros’ donations have widely condemned it. Soros, whose worth is an estimated $25 billion, has donated about $8 million to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign to date, and as much as $1 million to the candidate’s nonprofit Clinton Foundation.
