Mossack Fonseca made another significant move in 1994.
It helped the tiny nation of Niue — a South Pacific coral outcrop with a population of fewer than 2,000 — craft legislation that provided for incorporation of offshore companies. The law firm had picked Niue, Mossack later told Agence France-Presse, because it wanted a location in an Asia-Pacific time zone and because it would face no competitors: “If we had a jurisdiction that was small, and we had it from the beginning, we could offer people a stable environment, a stable price.”
The firm then signed a 20-year-deal with the small atoll’s government for exclusive rights to register offshore companies in Niue. Importantly, Niue offered registration in Chinese or Cyrillic characters, making it attractive to Chinese and Russian customers.
By 2001, Mossack Fonseca was doing so much business out of Niue that it was paying the equivalent of $1.6 million of the Niue government’s projected $2 million annual budget.
But the firm’s cozy relations with the island nation also began attracting unwanted scrutiny.
That same year the U.S. State Department questioned the “awkward sharing arrangements” between Niue and Mossack Fonseca and warned that Niue’s offshore industry had been “linked with the laundering of criminal proceeds from Russia and South America.”
The Financial Action Taskforce, an intergovernmental organization set up by major nations to combat money laundering, put Niue on a blacklist of jurisdictions that were failing to take steps to prevent money laundering, threatening economic sanctions.
Though Mossack denied that Niue was involved in money laundering, in 2001 the Bank of New York and Chase Manhattan imposed embargoes on transfers of dollars to Niue. In 2003, Niue declined to renew four Mossack Fonseca-incorporated companies, signaling that it would be shutting down the firm’s exclusive franchise.