The Architect's Silence
The first thing to understand about Mossack Fonseca is that it was not merely a law firm. For decades, this Panamanian operation functioned as something closer to a global infrastructure provider, a shadow institution that helped prime ministers, kings, presidents, dictators, drug cartels, Mafia clans, fraudsters, weapons dealers, and sanctioned regimes like North Korea and Iran move money beyond the reach of their own governments . When 11.5 million documents from its files reached the German newspaper *Süddeutsche Zeitung* and were shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, they revealed not merely individual acts of evasion but a coherent system — one that had used its influence to write and bend laws worldwide to favour the interests of criminals over a period of decades .