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Business & Economy Briefs

Business & Economy Briefs

ACP picks company to administer canal expansion

The Boston Big Dig's Parsons Brinckerhoff, which did the amazing Panama Canal expansion plan cost estimates in which a bridge or tunnel across the Atlantic entrance to the canal was added to the project without altering the costs and still has a long-term consulting contract with the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), isn't going to administer the canal expansion contracts. They and another company lost the competition for the job to Colorado-based CH2M Hill, one of the world's largest employee-owned companies. CH2M Hill an engineering, construction, management and consulting firm that's near the top of Money magazine's list of the best people for whom to work. CH2M Hill is also a major Iraq War contractor, having been given public infrastructure rehabilitation and expansion jobs by the Coalition Provisional Authority that preceded the present shaky Iraqi government. On the company's website they claim to have done work in Panama before but did not respond to questions from The Panama News about what that work was. Also unanswered were questions about how many Panamanians the company will hire and whether local workers will be allowed to own shares in the firm as its US employees are.

Ship grounding leads to claims of AMP neglect

The recent grounding of the Taiwanese container ship Ever Reach in Manzanillo Bay off of Colon has prompted a major round of finger pointing. Pilots, port managers and the shipping industry in general are claiming that the buoys marking access and egress to Manzanillo International Terminal and Colon Container Terminal have gone unmaintained and have been allowed to drift out of position. The Panama Maritime Authority (AMP) is in charge of those buoys, but is claiming that the ship grounded not because of negligently out of place buoys but because of sedimentation of the access channel, which it says is not its department. The AMP is a political patronage fiefdom of the Partido Popular (formerly the Christian Democrats), who have dedicated most of their efforts in the institution to moving offices in to buildings owned by party members and distributing jobs among party activists.

Air transport grew 21.3 percent last year

Civil aviation, rather than tourism or construction, was apparently the largest-growing Panamanian industry last year. La Prensa, citing figures from the Civil Aviation Authority, reports a 21.3 percent rise in 2006 over 2005. Tourism, of course, would have contributed to that increase. US restrictions on who can travel to or through the United States have also done much to boost Panama in general and COPA Airlines in general as this country rather than Miami is increasingly both the air hub of the Americas and direct service between Panama and Europe is becoming more popular with Latin Americas who don't want to deal with stopovers in US airports.

Underground unionism

It's not just the leftist SUNTRACS construction workers' union and allied organizations in the CONUSI labor federation. Mariano Mena, the secretary general of the rival Central General de Trabajadores de Panama (CGTP), which has its roots in Catholic rather than communist labor unionism, recently complained in El Panama America that the protections that this country's laws and constitution give to workers' right to organize unions and bargain collectively are mostly a dead letter. He said that labor organizing has to be done clandestinely and that it's not just company spies but the government that make this necessary. When the government learns of labor organizing, he said, "the next day those who are organizing are fired."

Young workers have until end of year to pick pension fund

The tens of thousands of older workers who have been denied the possibility of a retirement pension in the government's Social Security privatization won't start reaching retirement age until Martín Torrijos is out of office. The younger part of the working class --- those under 35 --- will have until the end of the year to either pick a privatized retirement fund or stay in the present public retirement fund, whose proceeds are largely invested in private banks, stocks and bonds and which is at high risk of actuarial failure as the private pension funds get to cherry pick the higher paid workers from the public fund.

Another death at a construction site

The construction industry saw its 18th death on the job on August 23, when a 10-wheel dump truck ran over 22-year-old Jair González, who was working on a pedestrian overpass and road widening project in front of the Los Pueblos shopping center on Avenida Jose Domingo Diaz. The Torrijos administration has been giving preference to non-union or company union construction firms for public works jobs lately and thus González was not protected by the master contract between the Panamanian Chamber of Construction (CAPAC) and the SUNTRACS construction workers union, which includes job safety provisions beyond those legal ones which the government is willing to enforce.

High court to hear oil spill sequestration appeal

Lower courts embargoed 5,000 barrels of oil at the partly state-owned Petroterminales de Panama (PTP) oil storage facility in Chiriqui Grande to make sure that residents of 14 Ngobe villages that depend on the seafood in the area affected by an oil spill last February would be able to be compensated for the loss of income, but it turned out that the oil --- and everything in all of PTP's tanks --- belonged to a third party. Thus high court magistrate Víctor Benavides lifted the sequestration order. Now, however, the full nine-member court has agreed to hear an appeal of Benavides's decision. A fair number of people from the affected communities are now living on the streets of Panama City and feeding themselves by panhandling, and it may be a long time before any decision about compensation for damage to the local fishery is handed down, let alone carried out.

Odebrecht, CUSA "win" Cinta Costera contract

A consortium of the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht and the local CUSA construction company has been awarded the contract to build the Cinta Costera landfill and road project in Panama Bay, despite the experienced Mexican firm ICA having submitted a lower bid. Usually when the government doesn't care to accept the low bid for a public contract or concession, it holds another round of bidding. It seems that Odebrecht, which has a long history of being at the center of bid rigging scandals --- one of which brought about the impeachment of a Brazilian president --- ordinary procedures do not apply.

Strange bidding process for new cell phone concessions

The Torrijos administration has announced that there are 12 companies interested in obtaining one of two new cell phone concessions, and that a bidding process will begin on October 27 --- but the results won't be announced until May of 2008.

Moody's keeps Panama debt at Ba1

Moody's Investor's Service rates Panamanian public debt at Ba1, well below the investment grade that has been promised for the financing of the Panama Canal expansion but apparently good enough for the Ministry of Finance to qualify as a positive achievement. Moody's says that Panama, which is growing at a fast pace like much of the rest of Latin America, has a more stable economy than most of its neighbors largely on the strength of its service sector.

Women paid $42 less

El Panama America reports that this country's more than half-million working women receive on average $42 per month less pay than men who work for a living. Women tend to be concentrated in the country's vital service sector, but they rarely get any of the top positions.

Welcome to another competitor

La Estrella, now principally owned by businessman Abdul Waked and politically aligned with the Partido Popular (formerly the Christian Democrats) has revived the company's long-dormant English-language publication, which, depending on how you want to count things, is Panama's oldest newspaper. The Panama Star began in 1849, merged with another paper to become the Star & Herald and started La Estrella as its Spanish supplement in 1853. During the 20th century it was owned by the Duque family, played a key role in the 1903 separation from Colombia by buying liquor to get the Colombian garrison in Colon drunk while the coup was unfolding, and then decades later became a propaganda organ for the dictatorship. As Manuel Antonio Noriega became ever less popular the English-speaking community boycotted the Star & Herald and it folded. The new version of The Panama Star is a supplement in La Estrella, gets its editors from The Visitor and The Bulletin and gets most of its content from foreign wire services. The Panama News is the most widely read English-language online news publication produced in Panama, leading about a half-dozen others. The Visitor really doesn't cover much news about Panama and generally restricts its cultural coverage to the promotion of advertisers, but the bilingual paper is the largest circulating print publication with English content here. The Panama Eagle, with which The Panama News has a working relationship, the Bajareque Times and the Bocas Breeze are also players in the English-language print publication business.

Torrijos nationalizes land for PYCSA

Although all of Máximo Haddad's insolvent PYCSA construction and highway management company has been placed under court-ordered receivership, the government has been ignoring the court order and pretending that a breakup of the company into several components that happened well after the debt for which the receivership was ordered and whose publication was suspiciously delayed for years gets around the receivership. Thus Odebrecht obtained the Colon to Panama toll road concession notwithstanding the receivership, and thus PYCSA was ordered to finish the Corredor Norte, which it hasn't been able do because it didn't have the money and citizens protesting the road coming right up against their houses instead of allowing a right-of-way for 50 meters on each side of the road had seized the company's heavy equipment. What to do? On August 10 President Torrijos issued a decree nationalizing some of the land along the route of PYCSA's Corredor Norte concession in San Miguelito.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this brief incorrectly stated that it was PYCSA, rather than the land that PYCSA seeks, that was expropriated.