Two years after the tax affairs of the rich and powerful were exposed when millions of documents leaked from offshore firm Mossack Fonseca, a second leak has revealed how its lawyers scrambled to deal with the catastrophic fall-out and how their clients went, to put it mildly, apeshit.

The first leak embarrassed celebrities, toppled politicians and triggered investigations around the world. It also exposed Mossack Fonseca's lacklustre adherence to anti-money laundering regulations. Instead of properly identifying new clients, the firm was shown to have routinely permitted intermediaries to instruct it to set up shell companies, the firm's stock in trade, without ever knowing the identities of the beneficiaries. Mossack Fonseca collapsed within two years of the leak and, after hastily retiring, founders Ramon Fonseca and Jurgen Mossack spent several months in a Panamanian jail before making bail.

The new cache of leaked documents, revealed by the ICIJ, covers the period just after the first leak. It captures the headless chicken party going on behind the scenes as Mossack Fonseca attempted to deal with the repercussions of the first leak by appeasing furious intermediaries and begging them to fill in the gaps in tens of thousands of deficient client identification forms. “This has been ridiculous”, wrote a Florida lawyer, Eliezer Panell, in one of the leaked emails. Mossack Fonseca staff had bombarded him with information requests. “WE CAN’T GO BACK a day after asking for papers to ask for something else", he wrote. "WE LOOK LIKE FUCKING AMATEURS. A Mickey Mouse operation”.

“THE CLIENT DISAPPEARED! I CAN NOT FIND HIM ANYMORE!!!!!!!”, emailed Nicole Didi, a Swiss wealth management adviser who acted for 80 companies set up by Mossack Fonseca. Leaked emails show her trying in vain to keep her name out of the public eye:



It’s gob smacking", emailed another intermediary, financier Jean-Yves de Louvigny, "and I demand you DELETE my name from all your files”.

"We don't know who our clients are!" "And now everyone knows it!"

The latest cache of documents has exposed the desperate and questionable measures the firm took to attempt to stop the bleeding. The day after the breach, Mossack Fonseca’s lawyer asked Panama’s attorney general to detain journalists reporting on the leak from within the country and to “urgently interrogate” them until they revealed their source. The request was rejected. The ICIJ reports that internal Mossack Fonseca emails show that it also asked an accountant to backdate a document so that it would appear as if the firm held accurate records on a company. The accountant refused, telling the lawyers it would be "easily refuted by an expert calligrapher”.

The most prophetic leaked email was written by Félix Chille, a Swiss intermediary who castigated the firm for the "unbelievable" situation. He wrote, “This email will, probably, be intercepted like 11,600,000 other documents. I don’t care”.