Marc Harris in more trouble

“Offshore asset protection guru” Marc Harris, now held in a jail cell in Miami after his flight from Panama to Nicaragua and subsequent expulsion to the United States this past June, is facing deeper legal trouble in both the United States and Panama.

Harris was originally charged with 13 counts of conspiracy and money laundering, which could have landed him a 55-year prison sentence, for financial transactions related to a scheme to smuggle freon, a refrigerant gas that’s illegal because it destroys the planet’s ozone layer, into the United States. The principals in that racket, US citizens Joseph and Tony Vigna, once worked with The Harris Organisation but then had a falling out in which they claimed that Harris had stolen millions of dollars from them. After that estrangement the Vignas were thrown out of Panama and ended up pleading guilty to reduced charges in exchange for testimony against Harris.

The new charges also have to do with the same scheme, but at the end of September the US attorney in Miami filed a superseding indictment alleging eight counts of tax evasion and conspiracy to evade taxes in addition to the previous charges.

The US government has been in a prolonged wrangle with its Nicaraguan counterpart over access to Harris’s files, which were seized by Nicaraguan authorities. On the American end the continuing Harris investigation is headed by the Internal Revenue Service and appears to be aimed at snaring the former CPA’s American clients on tax charges.

Meanwhile in Panama, the National Securities Commission (CNV, by its Spanish initials) has fined Harris $100,000 for unlicensed trading in securities through a network of at least 16 companies. For many years Marc Harris operated his financial spiderwebs out of Panama --- despite numerous complaints by clients that he had stolen their money and by the US and German governments that he was laundering the proceeds of criminal enterprises --- with the active protection of Attorney General José Antonio Sossa and other officials of successive administrations. However in 1999 the CNV, acting on complaints by at least four clients, began an investigation and the following year ordered Harris and his companies to cease their financial activities here. Harris applied for securities licenses but these were denied and the appeal went up to Panama’s Supreme Court, where the CNV’s decisions were upheld. Nevertheless, the commission found that the Harris network continued operating from Panama without licenses until sometime in 2001.

Harris notoriously boasted that he could make assets disappear into “black holes” where governments couldn’t find them. Although at the time of his arrest some of Harris’s more visible assets included luxury cars and an airplane, everything was in someone else’s name and its unclear whether the Panamanian government will be able to collect the $100,000 fine.

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More legal trouble for Marc Harris