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Volume
14, Number 8 |
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Also
in this section:  Bern loses big in court Developer / hotelier Herman Bern
isn't used to losing. Via the
Paradise
Beach Corporation that he controls he managed to win the concession
for four large lots of land at the former Fort Kobbe on which he has
built his exclusive Playa Bonita hotel and resort in a process wherein
opposing bidders were excluded by the old Interoceanic Regional
Authority (ARI).
However, the would-be competitors sued and while Bern moved to create a fait accompli on the ground the case ground for years through the courts. Finally, however, it got to the Supreme Court and that body held that the process by which the land for Playa Bonita was conceded was illegal. So what to do now? The losing party and the former ARI officials involved in the process are complaining about the decision, and one of their stronger arguments is that if this deal was illegal, so were lots of other ARI concessions. Well, yes, under the Pérez Balladares and Moscoso administrations ARI was a lawless, bloated and parasitic organization that wasted much of what was supposed to be coming to the Panamanian people under the 1977 Panama Canal treaties. But arguments about that don't deal with the problem at hand for Bern and Playa Bonita. Attorneys Guillermo Cochez and Víctor Martínez are moving to have Bern and the hotel evicted and the whole land deal declared a $2 million misappropriation of public assets. What's more likely however --- and hinted at in the high court's judgment --- is that to keep his hotel Bern is going to have to pay damages to the people who were prevented from bidding on the property. The precedents set in earlier court cases doesn't mean nearly as much in the Civil Code system of justice that Panama has as it does in the Anglo-American legal system. However, as a indication of how the high court is thinking after recent personnel changes, the Playa Bonita case surely has to worry all the developers who got land on Amador from ARI and have not made the payments required under their contracts, put in landfills without permits, or got their concessions by making false statements or rigging the process. These abuses describe many of the people who hit ARI jackpots, and now it seems that their days of getting away with things may be over. Photo by José F. Ponce, caption by Eric Jackson Also
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Make
the Executive Hotel your headquarters in Panama City --- http://ww.executivehotel-panama.com
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©
2008 by Eric Jackson email: editor@thepanamanews.com or e_l_jackson_malo@yahoo.com Mailing
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