Kremlin says Putin unfairly targeted in offshore leak reporting

The spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin says the strongman is the “main target” of the media investigation into offshore accounts, but that he was not implicated in any wrongdoing.

The documents published by more than 100 media outlets allege that Putin’s friends, including a leading cellist, were engaged in an offshore scheme.

Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov says “it’s obvious that the main target of such attacks is our president,” and claimed that the publication was aimed at influencing Russia’s stability and parliamentary elections scheduled for September.

Peskov says international media had wrongly focused on Putin instead of other world politicians, even though he was not implicated in any wrongdoing, and suggests the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a key player in the publication, has ties to the US government.

— AP