Russian President Vladimir Putin apologized on Friday for suggesting that the U.S. had worked with Goldman Sachs to leak incriminating information about him.
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On Thursday, he suggested that the German newspaper responsible for first reporting on the so-called Panama Papers was linked to the New York banking giant. “Who was the first to report it? Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, which is part of an American holding, Goldman Sachs,” Putin said during an annual call-in show for Russian voters to ask questions.
The paper denied the connection on Friday, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov subsequently acknowledged that mistakes had been made. “This is rather our mistake, a mistake of mine, of those who were preparing the reference papers on the issue,” he told Russia’s Interfax News Agency. “There really was unverified information concerning the owners of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, we didn’t double-check and gave it to the president.”
The papers implicated Sergei Roldugin, a famous cellist and godfather to Putin’s daughter, in offshore holding schemes worth billions. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which spent a year analyzing the documents, describes him as a “secret caretaker” to Putin’s wealth.
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Analysts, meanwhile, have suggested that any claim of secrecy is overestimated. Though Putin has not disclosed the extent of his wealth, some estimates have pegged him as the richest person on the planet, and Russian voters don’t seem to mind.
Spain’s minister of industry on Friday became the second global leader to resign over recent findings that he had stored assets offshore. Iceland’s prime minister resigned this month, just two days after the documents were published.
