Alwaght- The United States government funded the recently released offshore revelations known as the Panama Papers to damage Russia and President Putin, WikiLeaks has revealed.
On Wednesday, the international whistleblowing organization said on Twitter that the Panama Papers data leak was produced by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), "which targets Russia and [the] former USSR." The "Putin attack" was funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and American hedge fund billionaire George Soros, WikiLeaks added, saying that the US government's funding of such an attack is a serious blow to its integrity.
Earlier this week, the head of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which worked on the Panama Papers, said that Putin is not the target of the leak, but rather that the revelations aimed to shed light on murky offshore practices internationally. "It wasn’t a story about Russia. It was a story about the offshore world," ICIJ head Gerard Ryle told TASS.
His statement came in stark contrast to international media coverage of the "largest leak in offshore history." Although neither Vladimir Putin nor any members of his family are directly mentioned in the papers, many mainstream media outlets chose the Russian president’s photo when breaking the story.
Russia has said sentiments against the country’s President Vladimir Putin has reached boiling point in the West following leaked data, known as the Panama Papers implicating Putin.
Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov commenting on Monday on the so-called Panama leak said, “Such 'leaks', in our view, are meant to target audiences overseas. It is also clear that the degree of Putinophobia has reached a point where to speak well about Russia, or about some of its actions and successes is impossible. One needs to speak [about Russia] in negative terms, the more the better, and when there's nothing to say, you need to make things up. This is obvious to us".
