The blurry line between public and private sectors

Photo by Allan Hawkins

Blurring the distinctions between public and private sectors

The project this man is working on, the Cinta Costera, involves the government, in the form of "compensation," expanding the real estate holdings of the private Club de Yates y Pesca --- which never paid for its old Avenida Balboa premises as had been agreed back in the 50s --- and Herman Bern's Hotel Miramar --- whose controversial concession contract was rejected several years ago by the Comptroller General.

The orange uniform is that of Constructora Urbana SA (CUSA), Panama's largest construction company, which is owned by the Alemán family. (CUSA's former CEO, Alberto Alemán Zubieta, is the Panama Canal Administrator and his brother heads the Banco General, a private institution into which a substantial part of the public Social Security Fund is invested.) CUSA is a subcontractor for Norberto Odebrecht SA, the Panamanian subsidiary of a Brazilian company whose local shareholders are unknown due to this country's corporate secrecy laws. Odebrecht lost the bidding for the project but for reasons never coherently explained was given the contract anyway.

And who pays for the Hotel Miramar's and Club de Yates y Pesca's windfall? Apparently not all taxpayers --- just the ones who own property in Punta Paitilla, Punta Pacifica and those areas of other neighborhoods within a few blocks of Avenida Balboa, who will be hit with a special assessment. But wait --- that was version one of the story. Now we are up to version six or seven, wherein the Ministry of Public Works says that it has a committee working on it and they will let us know in December. Who's on that committee? It's a state secret, apparently to be guarded by the new SENIS secret police.

Back to the man in the photo. Notice that his CUSA uniform also bears the emblem of the national government.

And isn't that an appropriate symbol of the confusion of private and public interests inherent in many aspects of this project?

economy