WASHINGTON — Entrepreneurs and corrupt officials across Africa have used shell companies to hide profits from the sale of natural resources and the bribes paid to gain access to them, according to records leaked from a Panamanian law firm.

Owners of the hidden companies include, from Nigeria alone, three oil ministers, several senior employees of the national oil company and two former state governors who were convicted of laundering ill-gotten money from the oil industry, new reports about Africa based on the Panama Papers show. The owners of diamond mines in Sierra Leone and safari companies in Kenya and Zimbabwe also created shell companies.
Some of the assets cycled through the shell companies were used to buy yachts, private jets, Manhattan penthouses and luxury homes in Beverly Hills, Calif., the law firm documents show.
Articles posted on Monday by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and reports being published this week by news media organizations in 17 African countries, underscore the critical role that secret shell companies can play in facilitating tax evasion, bribery and other crimes. In Africa, offshore finance often underlies the exploitation of mineral wealth, with the benefits bypassing the public and going largely to wealthy executives and the government officials they pay off.
The 11.5 million documents taken from the Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca, by a source who has not been identified have been the subject of news coverage around the world since April, shedding new light on the murky world of offshore finance. The Panama Papers project, organized by the international journalists’ consortium, has involved more than 400 reporters around the world and has set off criminal investigations in many countries.
Mossack Fonseca has said it should not be blamed for wrongdoing by its customers. “We merely help incorporate companies, and before we agree to work with a client in any way, we conduct a thorough due-diligence process,” the firm said in a statement. The statement noted that the firm had not been charged with criminal wrongdoing in nearly 40 years of operation.
But the journalists found that Mossack Fonseca had sometimes missed or ignored evidence of criminal investigations or charges against its clients. Though the records show that the law firm did scrutinize many of those who sought its services, its reviews were often belated or incomplete, according to the articles’ main author, Will Fitzgibbon, who works at the consortium’s office in Washington.
Several major figures examined in the new Panama Papers reports have previously been accused of wrongdoing, and some are under criminal investigation or have been charged. But the details of their use of shell companies had not previously been disclosed.
The consortium identified 37 companies created by the law firm that had been named in court actions or government investigations involving natural resources in Africa. All told, Mossack Fonseca’s files revealed offshore companies that were established to own or do business with oil, natural gas and mining operations in 44 of Africa’s 54 countries.
In one major criminal case, Farid Bedjaoui, a nephew of a former Algerian foreign minister, has been accused by Italian prosecutors of arranging $275 million in bribes to help Saipem, an Italian oil and gas services company, win pipeline contracts in Algeria worth $10 billion. Mr. Bedjaoui, called “Mr. Three Percent” in news media reports for his purported share of the payoffs, has denied the charges.
The journalists’ consortium found that Mossack Fonseca had created 12 of the 17 shell companies linked to Mr. Bedjaoui that Italian prosecutors are investigating as possible conduits for bribes from 2007 to 2010. One of them, Collingdale Consultants Inc., was used to divert as much as $15 million to associates and the family of Chakib Khelil, Algeria’s energy minister from 1999 to 2010, according to the charges.
Mr. Bedjaoui, who has Algerian, French and Canadian citizenship, is accused of spinning a complex web to hide his money, with 16 bank accounts in Algeria, Dubai, Hong Kong, Lebanon, London, Singapore and Switzerland. His assets have been seized in Canada and France, where the police reportedly took a 140-foot yacht and paintings by Warhol, Miró and Dalí. United States officials are examining three New York properties bought by Mr. Bedjaoui, including a $28.5 million Fifth Avenue condominium, records show.
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source:http://voiceofaudacity..com.ng/2016/07/panama-papers-reveal-wide-use-of-shell.html

damn, see corruption everywhere

In other news, the sky is blue.
This revelation did nothing on the African continent, a farcry from its damning effect on nationals of developed nations. Africa is a zoo -- lesson noted and taken to heart.