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The fallout from the downfall of US-born “offshore asset protection guru” Marc Harris has prompted a cascading set of scandals in Nicaragua with reverberations in Panama. The Costa Rican angles of the affair have made headlines in that country as well, and meanwhile the US ambassador to Nicaragua has pleaded for the protection of and American access to files that Nicaraguan authorities seized in a July raid on Harris’s former home and office in Managua. Harris himself is awaiting trial on money laundering charges in the Miami Federal Detention Center.

The latest round of Nicaraguan headlines has mainly centered around immigration matters --- how the internationally notorious Harris obtained a Nicaraguan visa and how one of his key lieutenants, US-born Larry Gandolfi, obtained a Nicaraguan cedula.

If INTERPOL is investigating or has an international warrant for the arrest of a person, then ordinarily that should create visa problems if that person seeks to move to Nicaragua. In a widely reported case that led to the firings by Attorney General José Antonio Sossa of Panama’s PTJ and INTERPOL directors, the international police agency had forwarded US and German requests for Panamanian help in money laundering investigations here. Because it appeared that these requests were based on tax matters, and given Panama’s financial secrecy laws, Sossa denied the request, an action that was duly and truthfully reported in La Prensa and resulted in Sossa bringing unsuccessful criminal defamation charges against several of that daily’s journalists. One would expect, in any case, that if a request for information on Marc Harris were made to INTERPOL, there would at least be something about the German and American requests in the file.

However, Harris had no problems getting into Nicaragua. The country’s Vice- Minister of Government Alfonso Sandino says that he was in charge of passing on Harris’s request --- according to some Nicaraguan papers for its involvement of such a high- ranking official --- and that he forwarded the matter to the police for an investigation of Harris’s past. Nicaraguan National Police Chief Edwin Cordero says that INTERPOL was contacted and that there was no information about Harris coming from anywhere in the world in INTERPOL’s database, so Harris got the good conduct certificate which was needed to obtain a Nicaraguan visa. “It’s a problem with INTERPOL and police in other countries,” Cordero told the Managua daily El Nuevo Diario.

Meanwhile, the circumstances surrounding the procurement of a Nicaraguan cedula by key Harris lieutenant Lawrence Gandolfi have prompted more headlines in the Managua papers and a prosecutor’s investigation of a judge and several activists of the ruling Constitutional Liberal Party. Gandolfi got his citizenship card after Judge Napoleón Sánchez issued him a Nicaraguan birth certificate. That action was based upon a petition supported by the notarized statements of three supposed witnesses who said that they had known Gandolfi since he was a little boy and that he was Nicaraguan. Gandolfi was born in 1940. In the court records supporting Judge Sánchez’s issuance of a birth certificate, one of the supposed witnesses listed his year of birth as 1965, but it seems that this did not raise any doubts in the judge’s mind. In any case, it turns out that all three “witnesses” were fictitious. Once having obtained a birth certificate, Gandolfi went to Nicaragua’s Supreme Electoral Council and, with the help of several employees who work there because they are activists with the governing party, got his cedula.

It all looks bad, to the extent that Nicaraguan Minister of Government Eduardo Urcuyo told his country’s press that it appears that there was a lot of complicity between public officials and the Harris operation, and vowed that “all of Harris’s accomplices must fall.”

Meanwhile, Harris’s plane, notorious long before his exodus to Nicaragua for its use in former Peruvian spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos’s escape from Panama into clandestinity and later for its use for an illegal extradition from Panama in defiance of a Supreme Court order of a man wanted for fraud in China, is again in the news on several fronts. These include:

• An El Nuevo Diario report that in July of 2002 Nicaraguan fugitives Jorge Solís, Alfredo Fernández and Esteban Duquestrada, wanted in connection with a financial scandal that has political ties to the former administration of Arnoldo Alemán, flew in the plane from Panama to Guatemala, from whence their trails grew cold.

• A story in the Costa Rican daily La Nacion that Harris’s plane visited Costa Rica 74 times between January of 2002 and February of this year.

• Reports in the Nicaraguan, Costa Rican and Panamanian press saying that in 2002 the Nicaraguan police vacuum-searched the aircraft and found minute amounts of drug residue, but not enough to press charges against anybody. The Nicaraguans say that the searches were done at the request of Panamanian authorities, but police here deny it.

In the July raid in Managua, Nicaraguan police and prosecutors seized more than 1,500 boxes of paper files, computers and computer discs and a number of videotapes. There have been a number of leaks attributed to prosecution sources about the contents of those files, some of which suggest ties between Harris and members of current Nicaraguan President Enrique Bolaños’s relatives. It has also been alleged, based on such sources, that the files implicate former heads of state in several other Latin American countries, including Panama.

In the United States, the Harris investigation is headed by the Internal Revenue Service. That would suggest that the principal American interest is in tracking down Harris’s clients for possible tax prosecutions. Were frauds committed against such clients, money laundering or violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act at issue, the FBI would likely be in charge of the investigation. In any case, the US Justice Department has asked the Nicaraguan government for the material seized in Managua. President Bolaños has pointed out that Nicaraguan law enforcement is conducting its own criminal investigations of Harris and offered to provide the American authorities with copies of documents from the Harris files. In addition to that exchange, US Ambassador to Nicaragua Barbara Moore has sent a letter to Nicaraguan Attorney General Julio Centeno Gómez broadly requesting all seized financial records and all names, addresses and telephone numbers found in the impounded archives. However, Centeno Gómez has denied the request, arguing that it would be unconstitutional to forward such a broad range of documents without specific reasons arising from specific investigations of matters in which Nicaragua is legally bound to share information. In her letter to Centeno Gómez, Moore also pleaded for the files to be secured, especially against persons acting outside of governmental authority.

The exchanges between the United States and Nicaragua with respect to the Harris files have been the subject of much published speculation and innuendo about who may have a motive to conceal what.

Most frequently mentioned in Nicaragua is the possibility that moves may be afoot to extract documents that might incriminate jailed ex- President Alemán. El Nuevo Diario reported, and the Nicaraguan Attorney General specifically and emphatically denied, that among the seized documents there were videotapes of Nicargua’s first lady visiting Harris’s offices and of Bolaños’s niece visiting a Panama City casino with Harris.

In the Costa Rican press, much mention is made of one Vinicio Esquivel, a Costa Rican who handled at least $30 million in transactions for various Marc Harris companies by way of a now-collapsed British Virgin Islands company called Vinir Financial Services (VFS). In turn, VFS has gained local notoriety as the conduit through which at least $275,000 worth of illegal campaign contributions to Costa Rican President Abel Pacheco’s election campaign were laundered. With respect to both Marc Harris and the Pacheco campaign, Esquivel says that he was just acting like something of a banker and had no knowledge of any illegal activities by his clients.

None of the Central American or Panamanian mainstream press reports touch upon Harris’s US political connections and what implications those might have in connection with the tussle over who will have control over and access to the Harris archives. In 1988 Harris was the Florida spokesman for the unsuccessful Republican presidential primary campaign of General Alexander Haig, who had served as National Security Director during the Nixon administration and as White House Chief of staff under Ronald Reagan.

For the most part, the Panamanian corporate mainstream media have not been following the stories leaking out in the Nicaraguan press. (Think, for example, about who owns MEDCOM and it should be easy to see why RPC and Telemetro aren’t asking any questions here about allegations in Nicaragua that the Harris files implicate former Panamanian presidents.) The big exception to this trend is El Panama America.

After the allegations about Harris ties to former presidents, the next potential bombshell for Panama came from a La Prensa (the Nicaraguan daily, not the periodical of the same name here) report. A story in that paper, attributed to Nicaraguan prosecution sources, alleged that among the documents encountered in the Harris files were several that indicate that Harris was receiving inside information from the Panamanian Public Ministry, National Security Council and anti-money laundering Financial Analysis Unit. El Panama America, unlike the rest of the nation’s corporate mainstream media, reported the allegations here.

The only specific Panamanian government denial about Marc Harris having inside information that has appeared so far was by National Security Director Ramiro Jarvis, duly reported in El Panama America. According to Jarvis, he had never seen an alleged letter about Harris directed to himself by a US official. Jarvis rather curiously added, in support for his argument that the report was false, that the National Security Council does not keep files. (Might we then conclude that last year when Jarvis went on national television to accuse anti-corruption activist Enrique Montenegro of a plot to destabilize Panama, the surveillance reports that he showed off, made by secret agents “El Pintor” and “Oficial Renco,” were also forgeries?)

The purported document from the Financial Analysis Unit was reportedly signed by an “Agent Chacón.” The institution has not commented on the allegation. If Harris was getting information from inside the Financial Analysis Unit, the implications for the current administration could be far- reaching.

However, the Moscoso administration is in a way protected by Marc Harris’s notorious ties with the opposition. Attorney General Sossa, a Christian Democrat appointed by former PRD President Ernesto Pérez Balladares, did not just quash foreign requests for money laundering probes of Harris because they appeared to be based upon tax matters. He also failed to pursue several major fraud complaints by Harris clients, to the extent that had normal travel restrictions that apply to those under investigation for such offenses been imposed then Harris would not have been legally able to flee to Nicaragua. Moreover, in a dispute between Harris and his former lawyer Sossa deputized foreign bounty hunters hired by Harris to make arrests in Panama. Now Sossa’s party, renamed the Partido Popular, is allied with the PRD for the 2004 elections and because of its own vulnerabilities probably would not want to sling mud at the Arnulfistas over Marc Harris.

That, however, has not stopped Roberto Eisenmann from raising the issue of Sossa’s ties with Harris. Eisenmann, the former publisher of La Prensa, is active in a number of civic groups concerned about corruption issues, including the local chapter of Transparency International. His supporters lost control of La Prensa in a 2001 battle with an alliance of PRD and Christian Democrat shareholders, after an acrimonious campaign in which the paper’s aggressive reporting about Marc Harris was one of the issues in dispute. However, Eisenmann’s pronouncements still make their way into the paper, and on the front page of the July 31 edition the ex-publisher blasted Sossa for protecting Harris. “It has been proven that there was complicity between the Public Ministry and people involved in acts of corruption,” Eisenmann alleged, adding that when allegations of public corruption arise “the authorities must investigate them, instead of investigating the journalists.”

Sossa responded in the next day’s issue of La Prensa, calling Eisenmann a “coward” and adding that “I ask him that as a responsible person, if he has something specific and concrete to say, that he do so and assume the consequences of his act like a man.” Sossa declined to comment on his actions with respect to the various complaints against Harris. In its coverage of Sossa’s reply to Eisenmann the Panamanian La Prensa did not bring up the allegation of Marc Harris’s possession of documents from Sossa’s ministry that was reported in the Nicaraguan La Prensa.

Also in this section:
Business & Economy Briefs
Harris case prompts international disputes
The Panama News readership logs

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