Business & Economy Briefs

The Ministry of Labor Development is rejecting applications for work permits by foreign teachers and other professionals when their contracts do not specify the length of time that the person's job will last, and in most cases when the job lasts more than one year. The new policy is a matter of strict enforcement of a long existing law rather than a new law or regulation. Panama, where unemployment has been in double digits for many years and many professional organizations are openly xenophobic, is generally not a good place for a foreigner to find work. The main exception to this is for those who have money to start businesses of their own which employs Panamanians.

On June 8 the National Assembly unanimously approved on final reading a law to merge the public educational television channel, Canal Once, and the government's radio network, Radio Nacional, into a new State Radio and Television System (SERTV). Some sort of change was almost inevitable given the precarious state of Canal Once, which was looted and trashed in the previous administration. The new entity won't start to function as a unit for several months, as implementing regulations still have to be drawn up.

The notorious "good looking woman between the age of 18 and 25" employment ads can earn both the advertiser and the medium that publishes them a fine of up to $1000, the Ministry of Labor Development warns. Although Panama has long had a constitutional ban on many types of discrimination, only this past March was national legislation to implement it passed. Now employment discrimination based on race, gender, age, disability, ancestry, religion, political ideology or social class is a crime. So is the usual way that such discrimination is practiced, by way of requiring a photograph of the job applicant attached to every resume that will be accepted.

On the evening of June 18 cable thieves struck in Arraijan, stealing the wire that supplies electricity to the Laguna Alta water treatment plant, which purifies water from Gatun Lake to supply the needs of Arraijan and La Chorrera districts. As a result, some 350,000 people were left without water. Due in large part to China's building boom, world prices for scrap copper, steel and other metals are up and it has meant an sharp increase in this sort of criminal activity in Panama.

On June 14 the Supreme Court ordered the disbursement of 12 percent of the amounts they had on deposit for most shareholders in the collapsed Banco DISA. The company, originally founded on US government loan guarantees, fell amid a scandal about its investment in a pyramid scheme that set off multiple complex civil and criminal court cases. In January, these same depositors got nine percent of their deposits back. Under Panamanian law, when a bank goes under there is no insurance and citizens have priority over non-citizens. In this case, the extent to which directors were treated as management with lower priority than depositors and the extent that they are treated as ordinary depositors has been the subject of fierce litigation.

Expressing her annoyance at what she called "human commerce," Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez has banned funeral home personnel from the Public Ministry's morgues. She has also opened an internal investigation of several employees at the judicial morgue in Ancon, who are suspected of having improper ties to funeral homes. The funeral homes have traditionally waged fierce competition among themselves over who gets the bodies and resulting business from public and private morgues and hospitals.

You may not want to sail your ship into Chiriqui province's main seaport, Pedregal, at night. The Panama Maritime Authority (AMP) complains that a number of batteries, lightbulbs and lamps for the buoys and lighthouses along the approaches to Pedregal have been stolen.

Florencio Ríos has resigned as director of General Revenue Directorate (DGI), that part of the Ministry of Economy and Finance that collects the nation's taxes. According to the Torrijos administration, Ríos had agreed to take the job last September with the understanding that he'd only hold the post through the passage and implementation of the government's tax reform program, then return to his family business.

Comptroller General Dani Kuzniecki has issued an edict that any employee of the Comptroller General's office who gives any information to any person without prior authorization from superiors will be fired from his or her job. The Contraloria is the keeper of most of Panama's economic statistics and the move may thus tend to further reduce business journalism in this country to the posed photos of white men in suits that the political and economic elites prefer.

Way back when the Americans were concerned about the possibility of having to repel an amphibous assault on the Panama Canal, they built a series of huge underground bunkers to store all the ammunition they might need. The abandoned bunkers are still solid and will be for a very long time, and might have made wonderful places to grow mushrooms. However, the Interoceanic Regional Authority (ARI) has handed 14 of them, located in Arraijan just west of the canal, to the Cuerpo de Bomberos for use to store explosive or incendiary materials. A bunker in Cativa, in Colon province, had been used for this purpose but as people have built residences near the facility it was judged unsafe. The Arraijan bunkers are on an old firing range that has yet to be overrun by squatter invasions.

Las Bovedas, once a military fort and now the center of many cultural activities and something of a tourist attraction, won't house offices for the National Institute of Culture (INAC) much longer. There is plenty of empty office space in the capital, and great demand for space in Las Boveda for use as restaurants, art galleries and other cultural or tourist-oriented businesses. So the offices will move and the space that is opened will be rented to one or more private businesses of the sort that would enhance the area's attraction for visitors.

The government, which owns 49 percent of Cable & Wireless Panama, has received $63.7 million in dividends from the phone company for the 2004-2005 fiscal year. For the previous fiscal year the company reported losses and paid no dividends.

The Public Utilities Regulating Board (Ente Regulador) has upheld Claro.com's demand that people using its prepaid phone cards be allowed to use them at any public phone in the country. However, the operator of almost all of Panama's public phones, Cable & Wireless, is appealing the decision to the courts, arguing that because it bought a limited concession to operate the phone system developed at public expense by the old state-owned INTEL on condition that it invest in the system's infrastructure it's unfair for new competitors to be able to use the system now that the monopoly that the concession gave to C&W has expired. By various subterfuges and the support of the previous administration the company has mostly kept its telephone monopoly, which legally expired more than two years ago.

The European Union has banned two Panamanian-registry ships, the Andreas K and the Mediterranean Star, from its ports for violating safety standards. Within the Panama Maritime Authority there had already been ongoing safety-related proceedings against the Andreas K and that ship may be stricken from the registry as a result. The authority is also proceeding against several of the companies that had been approved to do ship inspections and have a history of approving vessels that should have been rejected.

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