Ramallah: The Palestinian Coalition for Transparency and Accountability (AMAN) has called for the setting up of a special investigating team to review the Palestinian angle of the Panama Papers whose leaks revealed that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s son Tareq held shares worth $1 million (Dh3.67 million) in a company associated with the Palestinian National Authority (PNA).
The coalition urged the Palestinian leadership to set up the team to test the authenticity of the Panama Papers and come up with conclusions.
In a special meeting of the coalition held in Ramallah to discuss the issue, the coalition announced that the Palestinian leadership is not creating an aggregate political will to follow up with the Panama Papers. The coalition said that the Palestinian institutions have not done anything so far to address the leaks of the papers, stressing that those institutions should implement the Palestinian law and question those accused of misusing the public funds and financial mismanagement and tax evasion.
Azmi Al Shuaibi, a counsellor of the coalition, highlighted the importance of the Panama Papers by saying that the leaks pointed fingers at Palestinian political and financial elite, where the transparency and integrity of the Palestinian institutions are at stake. The coalition stressed that the Palestinian leadership and institutions should have acted once the papers went public but it did not seem that relatives of Palestinian authorities were angry about the leak.
The AMAN said according to the Palestinian Companies Law, companies registered outside the Palestinian territories and regardless of their owners can function inside Palestine only when those companies are officially registered with the Palestinian official and related institutions which monitor their performance. The coalition said that those whose names were mentioned in the Panama Papers must submit financial statements that provide detailed information about their financial standing to the Palestinian Anti-Corruption Committee as under the Palestinian Anti Corruption Law.
Israeli daily Haaretz had published a report on the Panama Papers which revealed that a Palestinian “club” whose members link the financial and political worlds of the PNA and that Tareq Abbas held shares in a company (Arab Palestinian Company — APIC) associated with the PNA. Later on, Tareq held 10 per cent shares of a giant advertising company, SKY, which the APIC established and Tareq became its CEO and currently serves as the chairman of its board of directors on behalf of the APIC.
