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The US congressional debate over ratification of the Central American Free Trade Agreement may put a damper on things --- depending on how the vote goes --- but meanwhile La Prensa reports that talks for a bilateral free trade pact between the United States and Panama will begin in April. The daily’s Washington correspondent Betty Brannan Jaén reports that the Panamanian side is optimistic about a deal being reached before Mireya Moscoso leaves office at the end of next August, but thinks that any proposed treaty would not be submitted to the US Congress before that country’s November general elections.

Panama’s Foreign Ministry, in an uphill battle against US President George W. Bush’s brother Jeb to attract the headquarters of a Free Trade Area of the Americas to Panama rather than Miami, is offering to give the ATLAPA convention center to the contemplated organization, plus tax exemption and diplomatic immunity to all foreign representative to the institution and members of their families. In addition to Miami and Panama, Trinidad and Tobago is seeking to become the headquarters of a future hemispheric free trade zone (FTAA by its English initials, but often referred to here as ALCA by its Spanish initials). But Florida is a key battleground state and it is very unlikely that the Bush administration would allow Miami to lose such a competition before the US presidential election, which will take place in November, a couple of months after Mireya Moscoso and her foreign policy team will have left office. A Brazilian company that is suing to enforce a bidding process for the privatization of ATLAPA that it won, only to see the Moscoso administration later cancel the deal, might also make the Panamanian offer problematic.

The Panamanian government, the Japanese International Cooperation Agency and the Inter-American Development Bank have reached an agreement for $322 million in financing for the project to clean Panama Bay, according to the Moscoso administration. The Japanese will be financing a $150 million sewage treatment plant and the IADB will be funding $142 million worth of work on sewer lines leading to that plant, according to a Ministry of Health spokesman.

Telefonica de España, a Spanish-based multinational telecommunications giant, is making a bid to buy BellSouth’s mobile phone business in Latin America, including in Panama. Right now BellSouth and Cable & Wireless have exclusive dibs on cell phone market until 2007, and as a result of the oligopoly cell phone rates here are higher than in most other countries. But eventually new competitors will come into play and the business will be less lucrative, and apparently Telefonica thinks that it’s big and smart enough to prevail in that kind of a market. The bid for all of BellSouth’s Latin American cell phone business is reportedly between $5.6 and $6 billion. A controlling interest in BellSouth’s Panama business is held through a company called the Multi Holding Corporation, which is an interlocking directorate with MEDCOM, the Delta gas stations, Banco General, Grupo SUCASA and other prominent local companies. As this issue was being uploaded there were Spanish and Panamanian television reports that the deal had been closed.

Marine biologist Carlos Arrellano Lennox has stepped down as director of the National Environmental Authority (ANAM), after about three weeks on the job. He says that he took the post unaware of a law that prohibits people over the age of 75 years from holding government jobs. At a February 27 press conference he dismissed the notion that it was about the road that Mireya Moscoso wants to build past properties that she and her relatives own and through the Volcan Baru National Park. Arrellano Lennox added that ANAM had before his appointment rejected the environmental impact statement for the road but not the road itself.

The Constructora Urbana SA contractor for the controversial Boquete - Cerro Punta road through the Volcan Baru National Park has hired the same subcontractor to redo the environmental impact study that ANAM previously rejected and intends to submit the new document momentarily. Environmental groups and their lawyers argue that when, as in this case, an environmental impact statement is rejected among other reasons because it was performed by unqualified people, no new statement based upon the earlier improper work can be legally acceptable. To start from scratch on a new environmental study would take months, stalling the road project until after Mireya Moscoso is out of office. However, the president has expressed her determination to press ahead with the road past her and her relatives’ property and through the park.

On February 25 an international environmental group issued a warning that if the Boquete - Cerro Punta road past the properties of Mireya Moscoso and her relatives and through the Volcan Baru National Park is built it would have disastrous effects for the biological resources in the protected tropical cloud forest. The warning came in an open letter to President Moscoso from Russell A. Minttermeier, the president of Conservation International (CI). The CI warning is the latest in a string of international statements of concern, which have been made by The Nature Conservancy, the International Union for Nature Conservation, the World Resources Institute and officials of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the World Bank.

The “spiderweb” illegal connections to the power grid are so pervasive that a member of the legislature felt justified in pulling a gun on electric company workers who were disconnecting his --- and Mireya Moscoso renominated the gunman for another term in the assembly. So HOW pervasive? Spanish-based Union Fenosa, whose Panamanian subsidiary is one of this country’s private electric distribution companies, says in its case alone it’s to the tune of more than $10 million per year, or about 12 percent of the electricity it distributes. To add to the company’s economic losses, every now and then somebody is electrocuted while making one of these clandestine connections, and from time to time a building burns down due to a short-circuit caused by a faulty spiderweb.

Carnival, that wonderful time to play in the water spray, wasn’t so wet in parts of La Chorrera. The power went out at an IDAAN water treatment plant and more than 100,000 people went without running water for eight days, including the four days of Carnival. IDAAN says it’s the Union Fenosa electric company’s fault and has filed a complaint about it with Public Services Regulating Board (Ente Regulador).

Port Engineering and Consulting Company (PECC), a US-based firm whose silent owners apparently include former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares, has lost the buoy and lighthouse maintenance contract that the Pérez Balladares administration awarded it, based on what appears in the bank records to be an illegal kickback scheme whereby the former president received part of the proceeds from the deal. There were at least five civil or penal cases pending from the affair, not including a criminal investigation of Pérez Balladares, who enjoys immunity as a member of the Central American Parliament. Now there’s another case. The National Maritime Authority and Comptroller General Alvin Weeden sequestered PECC’s assets as part of the litigation, and is now using the company’s equipment, writing checks on the company’s bank accounts and employing the company’s work force to do the buoy maintenance work for which PECC had been contracted. PECC has thus moved to set aside the Supreme Court’s suspension of the contract and is further suing the comptroller and maritime authority for misappropriation of its assets.

People who live nearby have alleged in La Prensa that the Interoceanic Regional Authority (ARI), which was set up to maintain and dispose of assets that Panama acquired under the 1977 Panama Canal Treaties, sold 15 hectares of the Las Cruces Trail National Park, adjacent to the former Fort Clayton, for the construction of a shopping center. The Clayton residents have protested the move, but meanwhile ARI is refusing to divulge information about the deal to their attorney. Under Mireya Moscoso’s “personal interest” regulations, citizens have no right to information about the destruction of a national park, or the identity of the beneficiaries of such a move. The appropriation of national park land for a private shopping center would be, according to the letter of the law, illegal.

Workers at the Puerto Armuelles area banana farms that were transferred by PAFCO, a Chiquita Brands subsidiary, to a cooperative led by former banana workers union leader José Morris are threatening to go on strike against the co-op. Most of the banana workers have not been allowed to join the cooperative, which has lowered pay and benefits. A strike deadline has been set for March 9.



Also in this section:
Business & Economy Briefs
Controversy over ship security inspections
US government report on RP money laundering
EXPOCOMER 2004
The Panama News readership figures

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