Panama Cops Suspicious of Bank Transfer
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,