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Business & Economy Briefs
Government to subsidize electric companies
Faced with a threat to raise electric rates during an election campaign, the Moscoso administration has created a $20 million fund to reimburse Union Fenosa and Elektra Noreste for any increases in their costs of electric generation, power transmission or sales and advertising. After the collapse of ENRON, President Moscoso hired Panama’s top ENRON exec to draft policies for relations between the government and utilities that had been privatized under the previous administration.
MIT gets its land, now Evergreen wants compensation
One typical provision in Panama’s port concession contracts is that if another concessionaire gets a tax break or subsidy, so will the former enterprise. Thus the cost of Mireya Moscoso’s billion-dollar break for Panama Ports, the local subsidiary of Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa, continues to rise. The government has recently transferred five parcels of property in Coco Solo at no cost to the Manzanillo International Terminal (MIT), a local subsidiary of Seattle-based Stevedoring Services of America, to roughly equalize the break that Panama Ports got. Now Colon Container Terminal, MIT’s neighbor and a local subsidiary of Taiwan’s Evergreen shipping conglomerate, is demanding parity as well, in the form of 18 hectares of what remains of Coco Solo to expand its port facilities.
RP suspends imports of US beef
Panamanian agricultural authorities have ordered a temporary halt to imports of US beef, due to the mad cow scare in that country. The one cow identified with the disease, which can kill human beings as well, was traced back to Canada and this country is considering whether Canadian beef imports need to be suspended as well.
Suit filed in boys’ deaths
The families of three boys killed in a San Miguelito landslide caused by the PYCSA construction consortium’s failure to install proper drainage in an elevated roadway under construction have sued the company for $4 million in damages. Meanwhile, the company has been fined $25,000 for the incident and says it will not appeal. There is to be no investigation of the Ministry of Public Works officials who inspected and approved the substandard construction work.
Quirós promoted to ACP board
The Legislative Assembly left a lot of things undone when the 2003 session ended, but one things that it did accomplish was the ratification of President Moscoso’s appointment of Public Works Minister Eduardo Quirós to the Panama Canal Authority board of directors. Quirós’s roles in promoting the controversial Boquete - Cerro Punta road through Volcan Baru National Park and quashing inquiries into his ministry’s role in the collapse of a retaining wall on the Corredor Norte that killed three boys left his nomination in doubt, but the missing votes were found in the form of PRD renegade deputies Olivia de Pomares, Abelardo “Lalo” Antonio and Carlos Alvarado. There is a movement within the PRD to retaliate against the three legislators, who won their primaries last August, by throwing them off of the party ticket. Also approved by the legislature were the nominations of Alfredo Ramírez hijo and Norberto Delgado to the canal authority board and Melitón Arrocha to the Free Trade and Consumer Affairs Commission (CLICAC).
Banco Continental offers to buy Wall Street Securities
The consolidation of Panama’s financial services sector looks like it will continue in 2004, and one possibility is the acquisition of the Wall Street Securities stock and bond brokerage by Banco Continental. According to La Prensa, the bank’s holding company, Grupo Financiero Continental, has offered about $55.7 million for 100 percent of the brokerage’s shares. Wall Street Securities manages more than $700 million in its clients’ assets.
ARI to replace Torrijos mausoleum with tourism project
The Inter-Oceanic Regional Authority has signed a contract that will give a Spanish company a concession to build a $130 million “World Gate” mega-project on parcel 12 of the former Fort Amador. That’s where the mausoleum of the late General Omar Torrijos is located. The urn with the general’s remains was stolen from the mausoleum as part of the 1989 US invasion and has never been found. The late general was the father of PRD presidential candidate Martín Torrijos and on October 11, 1968 led a coup that deposed Dr. Arnulfo Arias, the late husband of Mireya Moscoso and uncle of ARI director Alfredo Arias.
Rural public telephone service in limbo
Under the terms of the law by which the old state-owned INTEL phone company was privatized, the concessionaire (Cable & Wireless Panama) would lose its telephony monopoly at the end of 2002, and at the end of 2003 its obligation to provide public telephones for remote rural communities would give way to a shared subsidy among the various telephone service providers to be specified by legislation. However, C&W has kept its monopoly on telephone lines by way of a “contract” with a company owned by a relative of a C&W exec, with ruinously high fees to connect with C&W phones, and then getting the Public Services Regulating Board (Ente Regulador) to accept those fees as the going rate for which any serious competitor would have to pay. Now Cable & Wireless says that its duty to maintain rural telephones has lapsed and there is no legislation about subsidizing the rural pay phones, upon which lives sometimes depend.
Also in this section:
Business & Economy Briefs
A year of high-profile scandals
All the hype
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