Panama’s electoral tribunal disqualified former President Ricardo Martinelli from working within the Might presidential election in gentle of a 10-year sentence he obtained for cash laundering.
The physique, which oversees the nation’s electoral course of, reached the choice on Monday night time after 10 hours of debate. In an announcement, it stated his disqualification was the results of his having been sentenced to greater than 5 years in jail for an intentional crime.
Panama’s Supreme Court docket final month denied Mr. Martinelli’s enchantment of the cash laundering conviction in a case through which prosecutors stated funds have been obtained from authorities contractors for the 2010 buy of a publishing home.
A couple of days after the court docket ruling, Mr. Martinelli, 71, a conservative businessman who led Panama from 2009 to 2014, was granted asylum by Nicaragua and fled to its embassy in Panama Metropolis, the capital.
Panama’s Overseas Ministry declined Nicaragua’s request to permit Mr. Martinelli to go away the nation, citing a world settlement on political asylum that states that international locations can not grant asylum to individuals who have been “duly prosecuted” for nonpolitical crimes.
Mr. Martinelli has stated that he’s harmless and a sufferer of political persecution, accusing the present president and vice chairman of trying to kill him to forestall him from taking workplace.
Mr. Martinelli’s spokesman, Luis Eduardo Camacho, known as the tribunal’s choice “unlawful” on Tuesday and accused the physique of procedural violations. “In Panama the state of legislation doesn’t exist, and we’re in the midst of a civil dictatorship,” he advised The New York Occasions.
The electoral tribunal is permitting Mr. Martinelli’s working mate, a former public safety minister named José Raúl Mulino, to run for president in his place.
“Martinelli is Mulino and Mulino is Martinelli,” Mr. Camacho stated merely.
Erasmo Pinilla, a former member of the electoral tribunal, stated that Mr. Martinelli’s staff might ask the tribunal to rethink its choice. However he stated no grounds existed for a reversal as a result of Panama’s Structure prohibits somebody who has been sentenced to 5 years or extra for deliberately committing against the law from turning into president.
“Like several choice, it may be reconsidered by the individuals who undertake it, however on this case they will’t change something,” he stated. “There’s a constitutional mandate, a authorized mandate, and a choice by the court docket.”
The choice leaves a handful of different presidential candidates. One among them, Ricardo Lombana, a former diplomat, wrote on the social media platform X, “That is the start, now let all of the others who’ve robbed cash from the folks fall.”
Polls had proven Mr. Martinelli as a prime contender within the election. His backers had famous that he presided over Panama throughout a interval of robust financial progress, together with a multibillion-dollar growth of the Panama Canal.
He has confronted earlier legal investigations. In 2021, he was acquitted on expenses of wiretapping opponents and journalists. He was additionally implicated in a pending authorized case associated to a multinational bribery scandal involving the Brazilian building firm Odebrecht.
Because the political drama unfolds, Mr. Martinelli seems to be making himself at residence within the Nicaraguan Embassy. One video on his X account reveals him exercising on a treadmill. In an image posted Tuesday morning, he lay smiling on a hammock with Bruno, his canine, cradled in his arms.
In obvious reference to the electoral tribunal’s choice, he wrote: “I awoke completely satisfied. The individuals who consider that is the epilogue of a guide ought to know that that is the prologue of the identical guide.”