by Rod Hughes

Panamanian judicial investigators are asking the Costa Rican nationalized Banco Popular why a cash deposit from a Panama bank came over the border in a private car. (Narcotics police there are nearly certain that it is not that Panama banks have never heard of Internet money transfers.)

The Ministry of Finance here is also interested in the case and is asking Popular executives why they did not report the strange bank-to-bank transfer of funds.

Javier Soriano, prosecutor for the Chiriqui Zone of Panama, said the money came from Banco Universal, a Panamanian bank with its headquarters near the Costa Rican border. “It’s highly unusual that banks send cash to one another,” said Soriano, “when electronic transfers are so much more secure.”

The newspaper La Nacion reported today that Banco Popular had received $1.2 million in cash from Banco Universal from January to September of this year. plus some 83 million in colones. Popular’s corporate manager, Gerardo Porras, partially answered the Finance Ministry’s question by saying that his bank does not have the resources to comply with all regulations dealing with “money from dubious sources.” (Whether this explanation will satisfy the ministry is also doubtful.)

He added that his bank is “examining the procedures” used in dealing with the Universal bank account. According to La Nacion, the procedure appears to have been that Banco Popular employees crossed the border to pick up the funds, passed through the frontier at Paso Canoas again in order to deposit the cash in a Popular Bank branch at Ciudad Neily, 17 kilometers north of the border crossing.

Banco Universal has operated in Panama’s northern zone since 1994 and officials of that bank indicate that their regular account was opened in Popular expressly for easy exchange into dollars of colones that came to them from Panama transactions,

by Rod Hughes

Don’t put away that umbrella yet. The National Meteorological Institute predicts rains for the Caribbean and Northern Zone during December and January due to the advance of one cold front each month interacting with a buildup of clouds.

It will not be exactly a continuation of the rainy season but it does mean more rain than usually falls during these two dry season months and that you will not be storing your umbrella in the closet soon. Even the Central Valley will be affected somewhat, suffering colder temperatures than usual.

Walter Stolz, chief of the analysis and prediction section at the institute, says that the Central Valley and the Pacific can also expect isolated shower during the dry season, which does not always happen there. But the Caribbean and the Northern Zone should be prepared for flooding, he cautioned.