On June 10, 2002 French investor Laurent Jean Marc-Parenti and his De Lesseps Holding Corporation won the bidding competition with the Land Transport and Transit Authority (ATTT) and was awarded the contract to build and operate a new Colon bus terminal, to be located near the Four Corners intersection. Colon’s various bus routes each have their own little owner-operator syndicates, and 15 of these organizations supported the French contract bid. But just before the end of that year, when people were paying attention to Christmas rather than to government contracts, the ATTT stripped Marc-Parenti and his holding company of the contract after attorney Saturnino Segarra complained about alleged irregularities in the bidding process.
Marc-Parenti and De Lesseps Holding sued the ATTT over that action the following April.
Almost exactly a year after the French bidders were stripped of the contract, in a Christmas Eve maneuver when people weren’t paying attention, the ATTT awarded the concession to Gran Terminal de Transporte Centenario SA.
That company’s owners include one of Segarra’s clients, Colon bus syndicate leader Gilberto Soto. Soto, whose organization had opposed the French bid, had the extra added advantage of being a member of the ATTT board of directors. Another of that company’s owners was one Gassam Salama, then the governor of Colon province by virtue of his appointment by Mireya Moscoso. Salama had an extra added advantage in the process: through his companies Colon Water Front Propertiers SA and Inversiones Cuatro Altos SA, he owned the land on which the terminal was to be built. The lawyer for Gran Terminal de Transporte Centenario SA turned out to be one Saturnino Segarra.
Meanwhile, Alma Montenegro de Fletcher, the nation’s administrative prosecutor at the time, issued an opinion upholding the French claim to the concession and rank-and-file bus drivers warned that they would shut down all public transportation in Colon province if Salama and Soto retained the contract. Mireya’s minister of government and justice at the time, Alejandro Pérez, also said that as far as he was concerned the French concession was still in effect.
The dispute was kept out of the election season headlines when the Moscoso administration’s ATTT director, Pablo Quintero Luna, delayed action pending a supposed review of the decision about where to locate the new bus terminal. That review never happened, the Moscoso gang suffered a crushing humiliation at the polls, and consummation of the Salama-Soto contract theft became a dead letter even in the context of the Mireyistas’ lame duck looting binge.
So there was one less ribbon for Mireya to cut on her way out, and one less opportunity for Colon residents to manifest their many grievances with her administration.
But meanwhile there was this case before the courts, at a time when the constitution was being amended in part to specifically authorize the legislature and president to pack the high court by expanding its membership. At the time the Supreme Court had a 5-4 majority of Moscoso appointees, and at the time it appeared that all vacancies to be filled by the incoming Martín Torrijos would be Ernesto Pérez Balladares appointees, thus leaving the Mireyistas in control of the judiciary all throughout the Torrijos administration.
(Torrijos quickly moved to change that arithmetic by invoking a mandatory retirement age law to remove the court’s presiding magistrate, Moscoso appointee César Pereira Burgos. That action is under appeal and is another story unto itself.)
As the realities of solid PRD control of both the executive and legislative branches of government, and of their explicit power to legislate the Mireyista high court majority into a minority, became clear, the court began to back away from its reputation as a rubber stamp for the Moscoso gang’s most flagrant acts of corruption. Upholding the Salama - Soto claim to the bus terminal contract would have been the sort of decision to inflame public demands to start a reform of the court system by ousting the Mireyistas from their position of power in the Supreme Court, so the case was allowed to languish before the court for nearly a year and one-half, until Moscoso, Salama and Quintero Luna were all out of office.
Then the matter was sent to arbitration, before a panel set up according to a commercial treaty between France and Panama, meeting under the auspices of the Panamanian Chamber of Construction (CAPAC). The arbitrators recently ruled in favor of the French investors, to the tune of $32.5 million.
But the arbitration may not be the final word. The new ATTT board could object to the award or the procedures that produced it and continue the case before the Supreme Court, and litigation could continue for years. Quintero Luna, meanwhile, is making a new claim: he argued in El Panama America that Panamanian laws require that the owners of this country’s public transportation businesses must be Panamanian citizens. (Previously this requirement has been interpreted to mean that only citizens could hold permits to run buses but was not applied to ancillary services affecting public transportation.)
The matter has taken on a diplomatic dimension, as the French government has backed its citizens in the dispute. Now with a large arbitration award strengthening Marc-Parenti’s and De Lesseps Holding’s hand, but facing the prospect of long and debilitating litigation before a court system that may itself become the subject of an incapacitating political struggle, French ambassador Christopher Philibert is taking a conciliatory stand. In El Panama America he suggested that it would be better to reach a negotiated settlement rather than continue the battle before the courts.
On the face of it, the Panamanian people face the prospect of paying tens of millions of dollars in awards and legal fees because of a flagrant act of corruption by several high-ranking members of Mireya Moscoso’s administration. So far, however, it seems that Salama, Quintero Luna et al won’t be prosecuted. The Public Ministry, speaking to La Prensa through attorney Ramiro Esquivel, noted that so far no criminal complaint has been filed and that “if there aren’t complaints of any crime, we can’t intervene.”
Also in this section:
Tax plan passes with some modifications
French company wins $32 million for Mireyista contract theft
The Panama News readership figures
Business & Economy Briefs
