Panama City, Amsterdam: Panamanian investigators on Friday raided a property used by Mossack Fonseca, the law firm at the centre of a massive leak of offshore financial data, removing bags full of shredded documents as evidence, a local prosecutor said.

“We have secured a large amount of evidence found in the location,” said organised crime investigator Javier Caraballo.

He said they also found many shredded papers, which they removed as evidence.

In a statement, Mossack Fonseca said it had digitised all its documents and that the shredded papers taken from its premises were bound for recycling. The law firm added that as a result of a previous search, prosecutors already had copies of all documents they removed on Friday.

Leaks from the Panama-based law firm, dubbed the “Panama Papers,” have embarrassed several world leaders and shone a spotlight on the shadowy world of offshore companies.

Mossack Fonseca, which specialises in setting up offshore companies, has said it broke no laws, destroyed no documents, and all its operations were legal.

Governments across the world have begun investigating possible financial wrongdoing by the rich and powerful after the leak of more than 11.5 million documents from the firm.

The papers have revealed financial arrangements of prominent figures, including friends of Russian President Vladimir Putin, relatives of the prime ministers of Britain and Pakistan and of China’s President Xi Jinping, and the president of Ukraine.

Meanwhile, EU finance ministers endorsed a series of measures on Saturday to fight tax evading methods used by Europeans exposed by the Panama Papers scandal.

“The sense of urgency is definitely much bigger,” said Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the finance minister from the Netherlands that holds the EU’s rotating presidency, on the second day of talks in Amsterdam.

“We’ve been (so) very busy competing with each other ... that big companies tend not to pay taxes,” said Dijsselbloem who is also head of the Eurogroup of Eurozone finance ministers.

The EU’s 28 member governments are “very committed to close the gaps”, he added.

Among the measures, the EU will propose a joint list of tax havens to expose jurisdictions used by European individuals and companies to evade or minimise taxes.

“There is unanimous support that Europe create its own list of tax havens by this summer,” said European Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici.

This could prove difficult, however, with EU countries already having individual lists based on highly different criteria.

The ministers also backed a proposal by the EU’s top powers to automatically exchange data in order to expose the real owners of shell companies.

Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain unveiled the measure at G20 talks in Washington last week.

“There is an assumed and converging willingness to fight any anonymous mechanisms” that aid tax evasion and money laundering, said French Finance Minister Michel Sapin.

The EU member countries will also launch talks next week on new rules requiring big companies operating in Europe to make public what they earn in each member state of the 28-nation bloc, Dijsselbloem said.

Country-by-country reporting has for years been a major demand of tax activists who accuse big corporations of secretly shifting profits to low-tax jurisdictions, often through the use of shell companies.

EU governments are divided on the proposal, with some arguing that sensitive corporate data should remain exclusive to tax authorities and not made public.

“I think we should not overshoot in tackling these things out of the hysteria on Panama,” said Austrian Finance Minister Hans Joerg Schelling.