Scathing report followed by wave of firings in the courts

Judges and court officials fired, others under investigation
by Eric Jackson, mostly from other media

Upon taking office as the presiding magistrate of Panama's Supreme Court of Justice this past January, Harley Mitchell promised to clean up the Panamanian judiciary and restore its reputation. Given his deep roots in the PRD and a 35-year tenure in a variety of government posts, several of them highly political if not elective, many skeptics, especially of the opposition persuasion, didn't take the promise too seriously.

But within a few months of his presidency, the courts were hit with what appeared to be, under the circumstances, a couple of major bribery cases and some other high profile incidents that appeared to indicate undue influence. In two major bankruptcy fraud cases, one involving the De La Guardia brothers and the ADELAG group of companies and the other involving the Nandwani family and Fotokina, this and that delay strung over many years permitted statutes of limitations to run and thus people who had apparently committed multi-million-dollar frauds escape trial and potential punishment. And then there was the case of President Torrijos's uncle, who skipped ahead of a prior claimant to grab government land on the beach at Chame at pennies on the dollar, then razed and landfilled a mangrove forest in gross violation of environmental laws, and was exonerated by a judge. Mitchell, appearing quite emotional about it, ordered an investigation into those and several other cases.

The presiding magistrate appeared even more upset when he announced in mid-August that he had the report of that investigation and that the results were grim. The report has not been published, and Mitchell did not provide names when he said that it had been finished.

However, certain things are hard to hide, and details of some of the fallout have come out in the media as people working in the court system have suddenly noticed that certain people are no longer working there.

Judge Bosco Molina, of the Fifth Civil Court, was fired for the disappearance of the interest accrued on a sequestration of more than $32 million in a lawsuit involving Yakima International, and it appears that he will be facing a criminal investigation over that matter. Four employees of the Fifth Penal Court have been fired for their parts in causing the delays --- "losing the file" and that sort of thing --- that thwarted the criminal prosecution of the De la Guardia brothers in the ADELAG case. Second Penal Court Judge Ricardo Mazza, who infamously let presidential uncle Rodolfo “Charro” Espino off the hook in the Chame beach case, was fired for a number of offenses. Also fired were La Chorrera Municipal Judge Violeta Soto and Seventh Civil Court Judge Jorge Isaac Escobar. In addition to these four judges, at least 11 clerks, secretaries or other court employees were fired for ethical lapses.

On September 4 the Supreme Court made new announcements. First, they are designing a system of procedures designed to detect the signs of corruption in pending cases. Second, a commission composed of magistrates Jerónimo Mejía, Esmeralda Arosemena de Troitiño and Adán Arnulfo Arjona will be conducting a further investigation into the ADELAG affair, this one specifically aimed at discovering how, why, and due to who's interventions the file in that case remained inaccessible in the Supreme Court Secretary General's office for nearly three years.

It has been popularly known for many years that Panama's courts run on bribery, and it's so bad that in one case in which a high court magistrate was caught on tape negotiating a $20,000 bribe to let a Colombian drug trafficker out of jail the entire nation heard the conversation (which was broadcast on television and radio) but the legislature acquitted the judge with majority but less than the required super-majority voting for conviction at the impeachment trial. One problem is that it's exceptionally rare to be able to prove bribery other than by circumstantial evidence, and the law provides that one filing a criminal complaint against a judge or other public official must attach complete summary proof of the charge to the complaint --- but if one has gathered circumstantial evidence of the offense to attach to the complaint, that's proof of an illegal investigation that prevents any criminal proceeding about the matter.

However, the Supreme Court has broad powers to supervise the entire judicial system and is not bound by the summary proof rule in court administrative matters. It is not, however, empowered to remove a corrupt colleague on the high court. That's left up to the National Assembly alone. So while there have been indications of corruption at the highest level of the court system, at the moment Mitchell is concentrating on the abuses at the lower levels.

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