According to an opinion by Administrative Prosecutor Alma Montenegro de Fletcher, such information that the National Securities Commission (CNV) has about companies whose shares or bonds are tradedon the Bolsa de Valores securities exchange is public informantion pursuant to the recently passed Transparency Law. That means that corporate secrecy, long a tradition in Panama, won't apply to publicly-held companies anymore. Theoretically a lot of information was supposed to be disclosed as a condition of trading shares or selling bonds on the Bolsa anyway, but the exchange's disclosure rules have been widely ignored, as have rules about conflicts of interest and insider trading. Now, however, information about who owns what that must be filed with the CNV during the course of mergers or corporate restructurings will no longer be kept confidential, as was the prior practice, unless the commission or someone else challenges the Administrative Prosecutor's opinion in court.

The Moscoso administration has signed an agreement with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group of the world's industrialized countries, that would commit Panama to exchanging tax data and ending most banking and corporate secrecy by 2005. The move is designed to get Panama off of the OECD's blacklist of tax havens, and is opposed by a large part of Panama's banking and finance industry and almost all of the country's international lawyers. As soon as the agreement was announced, though it would have to be approved by the Legislative Assembly and would in any case not take effect immediately, foreign depositors stepped up their withdrawals from Panamanian banks. The country's banks have been losing foreign business ever since Panama's name appeared on the Financial Action Task Force's and OECD's blacklists. We were taken off of the Financial Action Task Force list after strengthening our laws against money laundering.

The TRICOM telecommunications company, which is based in the Dominican Republic, has begun offering iDEN trunk radio telephone service, which from a user's perspective is roughly the same as cellular phone service. BellSouth and Cable & Wireless, which have cell phone concessions with exclusivity clauses that run through 2007, have sued. So far the courts and the Public Services Regulatory Board have sided with TRICOM, but appeals continue. BellSouth and Cable & Wireless have avoided competition with one another on the basis of price, so that Panama has some of the region's highest cell phone rates. TRICOM promises to break that monopolistic arrangement.

On April 25 the SUNTRACS construction workers' union and the Panamanian Construction Chamber (CAPAC) agreed on a three-year contract that ended a strike that lasted less than two days. The union, bargaining at a time when the economy is bad and jobs are hard to find, agreed to a 3.5 percent raise to be phased in over the contract's duration. Though there were some contfrontations with police and a number of arrests in Colon, the union's tactics in this labor dispute were tame by militant SUNTRACS standards.

The Legislative Assembly has passed on first and second reading an international convention against financial crimes in support of terrorism. The United Nations sponsored protocol requires countries to make it a crime to collect, hold or move funds with the knowledge that they are to be used to conduct terrorism. The United Nations definition of the t-word is different than the US definition, with the former concentrating on attacks against non-combatant civilians by non-governmental entities and the latter criminalizing violence against the United States or any government that the United States supports. Under the convention it should be illegal for Colombia's leftist guerrillas or rightist paramilitaries to do their banking here. The treaty must be passed on third reading, signed by the president and published in the Gaceta Oficial to become law, but by its terms the assembly will then have to pass specific implementing legislation.

After warnings from the National Security Council and foreign airport security experts, President Moscoso took a tour of the duty-free area of Tocumen Airport and ordered those stands that are located in the middle of corridors closed. The stands obstruct the view of those whose job it is to limit access and monitor suspicious activities in the airport, and thus increase the opportunities for hijackers, drug couriers, illegal migrants and other would-be offenders. Though it was not one of the reasons why the US Federal Aviation Administration lowered Panama's airport safety rating --- that had more to do with a deficient firefighting force and unmaintained safety equipment --- the quality of surveillance in restricted airport areas is one of the factors that would be considered in any future FAA safety rating.

Panama Ports, the local affiliate of Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa, is getting involved in a lot of petty economic disputes lately. That the parent company's profits are down sharply in recent quarters may have something to do with it. At the Port of Cristobal, the company asked for the resignations of about 60 employees, citing economic difficulties, and when the workers declined the request security guards were ordered to keep them off the premises. Under Panamanian labor laws the company would not be prevented from laying the employees off, but in that event it would be required to pay severance benefits that wouldn't apply if an employee voluntarily quit. The company is also withholding some $18.2 million in the payments that it owes the Panamanian government pursuant to the 1996 privatization contract by which it obtained the concession to run the ports, arguing that it was promised certain buildings that the Panama Canal Authority uses and never received them and that it incurred unexpected costs in the expansion of the Port of Balboa. A bigger economic stick is being wielded by the company's delay in expanding its container handling operations at Balboa, because that's holding up the entire multimodal container handling business upon which the rebuilt Panama Canal Railway is predicated and which several other ports had hoped would increase their activity.

While most legislators were at or paying attention to the Credentials Committee meeting that purported to end the bribery investigations that affect the entire Legislative Assembly and prosecutions that affect a number of individual deputies, enough legislators and suplentes got together to constitute a quorum (though that point is challenged) and passed an amendment to an amendment to a 1995 law regulating ship registrations. The change would allow the Merchant Marine Director to authorize discounts in the fees paid to register a ship under the Panamanian flag, or to waive various penalties or back taxes. Such decisions would not need to be justified to or approved by any other person or entity. Partido Popular deputy Teresita Yániz de Arias is appalled and has called upon President Moscoso to veto this "source of favoritism and corruption." The Panama Maritime Authority, for which the Merchant Marine Director works, is already the object of international scandals with respect to the sale of seafarers' certificates to unqualified people and the registry of unseaworthy ships, which have caused coast guards in many countries to order extra inspections of Panamanian-flag ships and their crews. Maritime Authority director Jerry Salazar defended the amendment, arguing that other countries handle such matters in the same way.

The Cable & Wireless phone company has laid off 50 people, mostly in middle management. The UK-based company said that it's restructuring in order to meet the challenges it will face when its monopoly over fixed-line telephone service ends at the beginning of 2003.

El Universal, which is said to have gained a new lease on life by way of large new investment by undisclosed persons, is still publishing but remains sequestered by the Social Security Fund and recently laid off 50 employees, mostly reporters and editors. La Prensa has been playing negative aspects of the story up in an attempt to entice El Universal's advertisers to stop patronizing the struggling daily. La Prensa, however, by publishing a recent opinion piece that referred to relative circulation figures among the nation's daily newspapers, implicitly admitted --- and not for the first time --- that it has been greatly inflating its circulation figures and falsely claiming to be the country's leading circulation newspaper. The best selling daily is actually the tabloid La Critica. Both La Prensa and El Universal, along with the sensationalist tabloid El Siglo, are editorially aligned with the PRD-Partido Popular political alliance.

The contracts under which Hutchison Whampoa obtained the concession to run the ports of Cristobal and Balboa, and the contracts under which the ports of Manzanillo International Terminal and Coco Solo Norte were built, all had clauses stating that if some facility received a tax break or subsidy, the concessionaires of that other port would get the same deal. Now lawyers for the various ports are combing through the recent concession contract that the Consorcio San Lorenzo and the government signed to create the Multimodal Industry and Service Center (CEMIS) that will have an expanded France Field airport as its centerpiece, and it is expected that they will be demanding all breaks that CEMIS will get that they don't currently enjoy. The government, which could lose substantial tax revenues, may argue that an airport and multimodal center is not the same thing as a seaport.

The Supreme Court has overturned the immediate expulsions and 90-day jail sentences decreed by the city of Arraijan for those who seize lands reverted to Panama when the US military bases withdrew from the area. The 1994 municipal decree, which has over the years been used against families organized by building materials vendors that have tried to take over canal watershed reforestation projects to build shantytowns, was declared unconstitutional by the courts, which held that cities don't have the power to punish land invaders.

One of the quality-of-life issues that sealed former Panama City mayor Mayín Correa's surprising defeat in the 1999 elections was the city's refusal to enforce laws prohibiting "unreasonable noise," whether from car alarms in the wee hours of the morning, rich kids racing their daddies' cars on Avenida Balboa after the bars closed, or night clubs that insist that their right to make a profit the way they want trumps the neighbors' right to sleep. Since Juan Carlos Navarro has taken over as mayor, the noise problems have continued but city policies have changed. Now warnings and tickets are being issued, and recently the Sorvivor discotheque in El Dorado was ordered closed for repeated violations.

The David Municipal Market, a good place to go for a traditional Panamanian breakfast on weekend mornings as well as a place to buy fresh agricultural products, is to be replaced. The municipal and national governments, supported by $1.5 million in financing from the Inter-American Development Bank, plan to build a new market with more parking spaces, more vending stalls and better sanitary standards. At the moment the project is in the phase in which sites are being considered and preliminary designs are being drafted.

Yardena Hebroni, the owner of Speed Joyeros and Argento Vivo in the Colon Free Zone, has been sentenced to 28 months in prison by a US federal district court in New York for conspiring to launder drug proceeds by way of transactions in gold. Hebroni's conviction and sentence comes as the result of a plea bargain in a case that the DEA claims involved more than $10 million in drug profits and a network that operated in Panama, the United States, Switzerland, Italy and Colombia.

Three shrimpers were wounded and more than a ton of shrimp were stolen in an April 24 attack near Isla Buenaventura in the Gulf of Panama's Perlas Archipelago. Six assailants firing pistols and Uzi submachine guns wounded the crew of the trawler Cristo Misericordia, one of them critically, and made off with their catch.

The University of Panama reports that for the first time in many years, lead levels in Panama City air have fallen below World Health Organization maximum limits. That's largely because the sale of leaded gasoline was phased out last year. However, over much of the city the air's particulate matter and nitrous oxide levels still exceed world health standards, according to the university's Specialized Analysis Institute.

The IDAAN water and sewer utility has hired 191 new employees to cut off water flow to people who haven't paid their bills. Many of the employees will be security guards, and the riot police are also likely to be busy with the shutoffs. IDAAN says that it is owed $59 million in unpaid water bills, $6.5 million of it by governmental entities. Labor unions have warned that there will be resistance if IDAAN comes into working class areas to shut off the water.

Santiago is one of several Panamanian cities that jumped on the privatization bandwagon by hiring CREDESOL, a private company whose owners are undisclosed under Panamanian corporate secrecy laws but who are often rumored to be politically well connected, to collect its garbage. Now CREDESOL is embargoed by Seguro Social for non-payment of its workers' health care and retirement deductions, even payment of garbage collection bills is no guarantee that refuse will actually be collected, all the accumulated garbage is a health hazard and a detriment to the business community. Thus Santiago is considering socialized garbage collection again, as privatization has failed.

Nata mayor Graciela Navarro has signed a contract with a company called Guayzteca to build and run a trash and garbage processing plant in the community. Such glass, metal and plastic that can be recycled would be separated out, while the organic garbage would be rotted and the resulting methane gas collected for fuel. On April 16 local residents staged a protest march against the facility, saying that they don't want it as a neighbor and they don't want all the garbage trucks in the area using their streets.

Panama Technological University (UTP), which is a spinoff of the former engineering and technological departments at the University of Panama, has a demanding entrance exam. When the test was given before the start of this school year, 3,935 youngsters took the exam and only 956 passed it. Of the top 10 secondary schools in terms of the percentage of its students who passed, only one, the Instituto David, was public. Every test taker from Colon's biggest public high school, Colegio Abel Bravo, flunked. Only 17 percent of test takers from the closest public high school to UTP's main campus, Artes y Oficios, passed. The basic problem is that with only a few exceptions the public schools are woefully deficient at teaching mathematics.

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