The Panamanian justice rejected this Friday the request for habeas corpus presented by the lawyer of the Uruguayan accountant Maya Cikurel Spillerpartner of the Minister of Education and Culture, Paul da Silveirawhich is being investigated as the alleged perpetrator of a crime of “money laundering” linked to the Odebrecht caseY declared the arrest warrant against him “legal”reported MVD Noticias (Tv Ciudad) and confirmed The Observer accessing the court decision.
The request was made by the lawyer of the Uruguayan, Edgar Sanchez, before a Criminal Cases Liquidation Court. The Panamanian Superior Court of Liquidations ruled against his claim.
Cikurel was arrested in Cologne when trying to take a boat to Buenos Aires on February 19, 2020because he had a red wanted alert from Interpol for his link to the Odebrecht casethe Brazilian construction company investigated by corruption for making payments and bribes to rulers to win bids and obtain million-dollar contracts.
The resolution of the Panamanian justice that rejects his request for habeas corpus (he understands that there is no evidence to carry out an arrest against him) came together with four other rejections of people linked to the case, promulgated between the 7th and the 9th of September: Úrsula Taute Banz Vallarino, María Isabel Carmona, María Del Sol Rivera Vigas and Linda Gesto Jhonson. All will be part of the hearing for the Odebrecht Case that begins this Monday in Panama.
In a first instance, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (by prosecutor Ruth Morcillo, superior prosecutor Mahamad Daud Hassan and deputy prosecutor Olmedo Gómez) will present the theory of the caseand also the requests to call the people involved to trialamong which is Cikurel, reported the Panamanian media outlet Prensa.
The case
The acts of corruption involving the detainee were committed between January 1, 2009 and May 1, 2012and the arrest warrant against Cikurel was issued on April 17, 2019although it was only on the 30th of that month that Interpol raised a red alert against the required one.
“It is linked to a Swiss-Panama connection, within an investigation into the so-called Odebrecht Box 2”, Panamanian sources indicated to The Observer in 2020, in relation to the “box” in which the Brazilian construction company he collected the money to pay the bribes.
The illicit payments in whose financial engineering the respondent would have participated were received by Luis Enrique Martinelli Linares and Ricardo Martinelli Linares, sons of the former president of Panama, Ricardo Martinelli Berrocal.
In May 2020, Judge María Helena Mainard released Cikurel, despite Panama’s extradition request against him. Prosecutor Ricardo Lackner said at a press conference after the decision that in his opinion “the requirements are met” for extradition to be grantedbut stated that There was no “flight risk”, so he did not oppose the removal of the house arrest order.
This woman had already been required by the Justice of the Caribbean country in February 2018. Then it had been quoted as questionedfor which Panama asked Uruguay to allow the accountant to be questioned in the framework of this investigation, but the local Justice understood that it was not appropriate due to a formal question. “It was suggested that extradition be made, since a statement could not be taken here”explained prosecutor Ricardo Lackner.
