The Panama papers leak was funded by the U.S. government and U.S. billionaire philanthropist George Soros as an attack on Russian President Vladimir Putin, WikiLeaks said in a post on Twitter on Wednesday.
The attack on Putin was “produced by [the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project] OCCRP which targets Russia & former USSR and was funded by [the U.S. Agency for International Development] USAID & Soros,” the WikiLeaks tweet said.
The Panama Papers were published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) on Sunday based on leaked documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.
The papers implicate members of Putin's inner circle in an alleged $2 billion money laundering scheme, identifying musician and Putin's close friend Sergei Roldugin as the owner of a number of offshore companies that helped to channel the funds back to Russia.
USAID was expelled from Russia in 2012 following Russia's crackdown on NGOs that receive foreign funding. Last year Russia branded the Open Society Foundation and the Open Society Institute's Assistance Foundation, both financed by Soros, as “undesirable organizations.”
