Panama’s electoral court has disqualified former President Ricardo Martinelli from running in May’s presidential election in light of a 10-year sentence he received for money laundering.
The body that oversees the country’s electoral process reached the decision Monday evening after 10 hours of debate. In a statement, he said his disqualification was the result of his being sentenced to more than five years in prison for an intentional crime.
Panama’s Supreme Court last month rejected Martinelli’s appeal of his money laundering conviction in a case in which prosecutors said funds were obtained from government contractors for the 2010 purchase of a publishing house .
A few days after the court ruling, Martinelli, 71, a conservative businessman who led Panama from 2009 to 2014, was granted asylum by Nicaragua and fled to its embassy in Panama City, the capital.
Panama’s Foreign Ministry rejected Nicaragua’s request to allow Mr. Martinelli to leave the country, citing an international agreement on political asylum that states countries cannot grant asylum to people who have been “duly prosecuted” for crimes not politicians.
Martinelli declared himself innocent and a victim of political persecution, accusing the current president and vice president of trying to kill him to prevent him from taking office.
On Tuesday, Mr. Martinelli’s spokesman, Luis Eduardo Camacho, called the court’s decision “illegal” and accused the body of procedural violations. “The rule of law does not exist in Panama and we are in the midst of a civil dictatorship,” he told the New York Times.
The electoral court allows Martinelli’s vice president, a former public security minister named José Raúl Mulino, to run for president in his place.
“Martinelli is Mulino and Mulino is Martinelli,” Mr. Camacho said simply.
Erasmo Pinilla, a former member of the electoral tribunal, said Martinelli’s team could ask the court to reconsider its decision. But he said there was no basis for a reversal because Panama’s Constitution prohibits someone who has been sentenced to five years or more for intentionally committing a crime from becoming president.
“Like any decision, it can be reconsidered by the people who make it, but in this case they can’t change anything,” he said. “There is a constitutional mandate, a legal mandate and a court decision.”
The decision leaves a handful of other presidential candidates. One of them, Ricardo Lombana, a former diplomat, wrote on the social platform X: “This is the beginning, now let’s drop all the others who have robbed the people.”
Polls had shown Martinelli as one of the main contenders in the elections. His supporters had noted that he had presided over Panama during a period of strong economic growth, including a multibillion-dollar expansion of the Panama Canal.
He has faced previous criminal investigations. In 2021 he was acquitted of wiretapping opponents and journalists. He has also been implicated in a pending lawsuit related to a multinational corruption scandal involving the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht.
As the political drama unfolds, Mr. Martinelli appears to feel at home in the Nicaraguan embassy. A video on his X account of him shows him exercising on a treadmill. In a photo posted Tuesday morning, he lay smiling in a hammock with Bruno, his dog, cradled in his arms.
Apparently referring to the electoral tribunal’s decision, he wrote: “I woke up happy. People who believe that this is the epilogue of a book should know that this is the prologue of the same book.”
