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Also in this section:
Preparing the ground for Seguro Social reforms
Business & Economy Briefs

Business & Economy Briefs

Back to school

On March 14 some 780,000 primary and secondary students went back to school. That’s about 7,000 more students than there were last year. Although a few schools were not in physical condition to be used, this year’s problems of that nature appear to be less than in recent years.

Immigration laws to change

The government says it will be “simplifying” Panama’s immigration laws in this legislative session. There is a maze of laws in which immigration status is linked to certain types of investments, our policies about refugees have prompted international condemnation and there is a substantial group of illegal immigrants within the country, so one might expect an immigration reform proposal to deal with a wide range of problems. So far, there are no details about the plan that the cabinet is considering.

We’re number 84!

Transparency International rates Panama as the 84th most corrupt country in the world in which to do business. That makes us almost as clean as Colombia, and slightly cleaner than Peru.

RP figures in US tax prosecution

The American taxman is treating it as the biggest tax evasion case ever. Telecommunications investor Walter Anderson is accused of evading some $200 million in taxes by running more than $450 million through a spiderweb of offshore companies, including Panamanian ones. Because of his offshore assets Anderson has been called a flight risk by prosecutors and a federal judge in the District of Columbia has denied him bail for that reason.

Panama story wins magazine award

Baseline magazine has won the Grand Neal Award for business journalism for a story of faulty computer software, people who didn’t calibrate their machines manually and the cancer patients who were thus killed or injured by radiation overdoses at the Instituto Oncologico Nacional. While in the USA the software company was being run out of business by federal authorities for its poor safety record, in Panama management issues as well as this technical fact were ignored in the legal actions, but some doctors and x-ray technicians were convicted of criminal negligence.

US-RP student visa deal

The governments of the United States and Panama have agreed to a reciprocal five-year visa for their students attending schools in the other country. Mostly it’s  a matter of Panamanians students going to US universities, but at the local  Florida State University campus, research projects carried out through the Smithsonian and various institutions related to the City of Knowledge there is a little bit of traffic in the other direction.

Rivera fears for his family’s safety here

The biggest house in Puerto Caimito --- Mariano Rivera’s --- is up for sale. The Yankees’ closer has moved his family to the United States, part of the continuing fallout after the kidnapping for ransom in Venezuela of the mother of major league pitcher Ugueth Urbina. Rivera said that the risk of kidnapping in Panama is more than he cares to put his family through, and he’s not the only elite Latin American athlete to come to such a conclusion of late.

Giant squid again

They’re not like the thing that pulled down the Golden Gate Bridge in “It Came from Beneath the Sea.” They do get upwards of 30 pounds, however, and lend themselves to interesting stuffed concoctions. They are the giant squid that move into the waters off Pedasi during El Nino events.

Also in this section:
Preparing the ground for Seguro Social reforms
Business & Economy Briefs