economy

Tourism Minister Salomón Shamah has been caught by investigative journalist Santiago Cumbrera of El Panama America steering no-bid government contracts to his real estate partner. The government is making no forthright denials but crying no harm and no foul. The president's cousin, "anti-corruption czar" Fernando Núñez Fábrega, declared that it's not right to condemn somebody "simply for being a member of a party or family or being a friend of a public official" to "die of hunger because he can't do business with the largest buyer of goods and services, which is the state."

Shamah awarded at least two contracts with the Panama Tourism Authority (ATP), without any bidding process, to fellow Colombian immigrant Patrick Castagnet and his recently formed company, Surf Box Inc. One contract gave Castagnet's company $50,000 for 1,000 photograhs and a two-minute video of a surfing competition in Tonosi this past August. The other was for the company to organize two events, the World Masters Surf Championships for surfers over age 35, which took place this past August 25 to September 5 at Santa Catalina; and the Reef Classic model and surfing competition which took place at the Figali Convention Center and Play Venao this past April.

Castagnet formed Surf Box Inc. in March of 2010, but the professional surfer has dabbled in media for many years. He designed a CD album cover for Oceano, an undistinguished rock band for which Shamah plays the keyboards.

Shamah and Castagnet are old friends and both part of a real estate investment group that bought at least one property from the old Interoceanic Regional Authority (ARI) in 2002. The two other partners in that real estate deal were brothers Pablo Luciano Quintero Gómez and Gustavo Adolfo Quintero Gómez. Their sister, Teodolinda Quintero de Cortez, was hired by Shamah as planning director at the ATP.

A monotonous routine

Every five years, someone who wants to be president rails against the corruption of the incumbent administration and promises that things will be different on his or her shift.

The Pérez Balladares administration made some effort to conceal the kickbacks that came to Toro and other top government officials, and did not conceal its efforts to prosecute or otherwise retaliate against anyone in the news media who posed embarrassing questions about government sleaze. In the name of "an end to judicial terrorism" he hired a pro-corruption Attorney General who shut down all but the most politically contrived accountability for public corruption. It has been US prosecutors and courts that have most glaringly exposed the corruption of the Pérez Balladares years.

Mireya Moscoso inherited Toro's top prosecutor and proceeded to divide ministries and government agencies among parties in her coalition and the extended families of her friends. Impunity was taken for granted by the political class. Mireya spent more than $1,000 per day on clothing and jewelry for herself. The Ministry of Education became a fiefdom for the extended Rosas clan, then the bosses of MOLIRENA. The Martinellis got the Ministry of Canal Affairs and the IDAAN water and sewer authority --- the latter venue put in charge of Ricardo Martinelli's cousin Ramón, who instituted an illegal Cambio Democratico dues deduction from utility workers' paychecks. The government was stuffed full of Mireya's relatives and their relatives, to the point where elaborate family trees were published, the Catholic bishops cried foul --- and the president declared that it's not a sin to put relatives on the payroll. The "private foundations" by which Moscoso diverted foreign aid to friends and family may have been the costliest points on the litany, but Dalvis Xiomara Sánchez, the presidential secretary with large amounts of cash in the freezer --- now facing an unusual trial for inexplicable enrichment while holding a government job --- became the infamous "Durodollars Lady" and politically deadly laughing stock.

The Mireyistas were crushed in 2004, by a PRD promising "Zero Corruption." But they just inserted their clans into the government, and set out on a looting binge that particularly affected the Ministry of Education. The Torrijos administration was marked by severe abuses in urban planning for the benefit of developers. Some of the schemes were outright fraudulent, many of them apparent money laundering fronts, and a few of their perpetrators were murderous hoodlums rather than white-collar criminals. The Colombian connections were the public relations downfall of the PRD's hopes of retaining control of the government. The Murcia Guzmán scandals, which might break out again in unpredictable directions, are still fizzing away in the United States, where the Colombian racketeer is being held on drug money laundering charges under circumstances that suggest that he's telling his story to prosecutors. Murcia gave $800,000 to Ricardo Martinelli, and even though he got prosecutors to declare that perfectly acceptable, it may haunt him from afar and, also given that the defense lawyer for part of the Murcia entourage is the current Minister of Labor Development, the present government is prosecuting people who write about the scandal, not PRD people who were involved in it. Instead, the alleged PRD side of an apparent Moscoso administration legislative bribery scandal and the Torrijos administration peculations in the Ministry of Education are the targets of Martinelli's selective wrath.

So Ricardo Martinelli campaigned in mad prophet mode in 2009, declared that "there are more of us crazies" and complaining about people who come into government broke and leave as millionaires.

But wait! --- it's not like it seems!

Of course not. The president's cousin, the anti-corruption czar, says that it's OK for public officials to spend money on no-bid contracts with their friends and relatives. Why not their business partners?

Shamah noted in an email to El Panama America that "Castagnet... is not an unknown for the ATP (formerly IPAT), as since 1995 he has for different administrations lent his services as a photographer, producer and host." What's more, he added, "the company was hired because it holds the rights to the Reef Classic." Surf Box, an ATP statement maintained, "is the only company in the country with high levels of competitiveness in the product concerned."