When in the tiered circles of the Spanish Chamber of Commerce in Panama they ask for the lawyer Mauricio Cort García, silence falls. None of the businessmen consulted wanted to comment on this handsome Spanish lawyer who settled in Panama and has specialized for two decades in the hermetic trade of buying and selling wills. Or, which is the same, in collecting bribes of up to 10% of a job at construction companies on behalf of corrupt Latin American leaders.
From Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction giant that perpetrated the largest corruption scheme in America, to the Spanish multinational FCC, which won seven awards worth $434 million after signing the lawyer in 2010. Major brick totem poles have touched the door of the discreet creator.
“He’s educated, cocky, always wears a suit and wears good watches,” admits a former classmate at Panama’s Santa María La Antigua Catholic University, where Cort majored in law and political science. When asked about less superficial aspects of his colleague, this lawyer politely interrupts the conversation. “He is a complete stranger in the legal field,” adds another prestigious jurist. “He belonged to the Chamber of Commerce of Spain in Panama, but he is no longer a member”, they clarify from this body without going into detail.
Cort, 52,’s ability to connect developers to the darker side of power is almost as important as his ability to blend in. A profile that allowed him to sneak into carpeted decision-making offices and win awards from the governments of Ricardo Martinelli (Panama), Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua) and Mauricio Funes (El Salvador) between 2010 and 2014. And also take advantage of the great infrastructure of Felipe Calderón’s presidential term in Mexico (2006-2012), the La Yesca hydroelectric plant in the state of Nayarit. Cort charged Andorra three million for a mysterious report on this work assigned to the Mexican ICA which, in the opinion of the European country’s police, would have disguised a commission collection scheme, as revealed by EL PAÍS.
The embryo of Cort’s empire of corruption is to be found on the first floor of a glass building on Manuel María Icaza Street in Panama City. It’s May of 2003. And this lawyer, a smug guy with the air of a winner, has already spent a decade working in Panamanian law firms. He has worked in two offices, holds an MBA from the University of Valencia and believes it is time to fly solo. He creates Cort Business Brokers and Consultors, a company that, under the umbrella of “consulting in public procurement and procurement”, offers its clients a direct path to power. No shortcuts.
Panama, a tiny nation of 4.4 million that has topped the list of tax havens for decades due to its opacity, is an ideal place to embark on the project.
A Spaniard in Las Garzas
The arrival of businessman Ricardo Martinelli to the government of the Central American country in 2009 triggered the business of the mysterious Spanish company. The lawyer begins to move like a fish in water in the Las Garzas building, the seat of government. He presumably becomes the official intermediary and, in a certain sense, the courtly adviser of Martinelli in matters of briefcases.
Eugenio del Barrio, who until 2013 was director in Latin America of the FCC – a multinational company under investigation in Andorra and Spain for having paid commissions to the Court to win contracts in Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Costa Rica – acknowledged the sphere of influence of the Spanish in the Martinelli Executive. “We had never heard of this man…. The same minister Federico Suárez, who was the head of Public Works, told the general manager of the construction company to hire Mauricio Cort”, explained Del Barrio in June 2019 in front of two Panamanian prosecutors during a secret agreement, later declared void due to technicalities formal.
Forged in the Panamanian embassy in Madrid, the frustrated collaboration has allowed the unspeakable management of the lawyer to emerge. And knowing that Cort was charging the FCC 10% per premium, he made decisions and adjusted margins for jobs, according to Del Barrio. The former executive ensured that the Spanish construction company paid 40 million in commissions for having won the tenders between 2010 and 2014 in the Central American country.
And is that, after hiring Cort, FCC won the works of the Luis Chicho Fábrega hospital (127 million euros), the headquarters of the electoral tribunal (27.6) access to the Canal Pacific Canal (187) – in consortium with the companies ICA and Meco— and the rehabilitation of the Centenary bridge (27.6). EL PAÍS has tried unsuccessfully to obtain the FCC version.
To legalize the business, Cort disguised his bites with alleged consultancy deals that he billed through his instrumental company Arados de Plata. A company created in Montevideo (Uruguay) in 2004 and in which the citizen of this nationality Juan Carlos Siekavica Costa appeared as front man.
The key that the lawyer used to get into the Martinelli club is an enigma. The lawyer told Panamanian prosecutors that he met Ricardo Martinelli Linares, son of the former president, in the United States in 2012 and that he planned a deal with him to purchase tankers worth $17.7 million . The outcome of this enterprise is another mystery.
Cort’s ascent to the Las Garzas mansion took an unexpected turn in the middle of Martinelli’s tenure (2009-2014). The then president announced to the executives of the FCC that he intended to fire Federico Suárez from the Ministry of Public Works and that the new interlocutor with the company would be Riccardo Francolini.
The fall from grace didn’t stop the Spaniard from cashing in during his time as a man of influence. In 2010, a year after Martinelli’s arrival in the Panamanian executive, Cort became a client of Banca Privada d’Andorra (BPA) to pay his professional fees, of 10 million dollars a year. He gets to manage four accounts on behalf of companies instrumental to this entity. He used one to allegedly collect bribes from the FCC and another to transfer money to Odebrecht. And he never hid his intentions. “Channel commissions from Spanish companies in Latam,” Cort Business Brokers and Consultors founder revealed to know your customer (know your customer), a kind of third degree that BPA customers filled out to clarify the origin of their wealth.
But so much success, transfers of millions and transfers set off alarm bells. The Spaniard’s plans to inject funds from the Bahamas and Switzerland into Andorra and to use the European country to “buy real estate” and pay for “real estate and financial investments” to third parties make him suspicious. This was revealed by a confidential report by the BPA, which in 2010 warned of the risk of accepting the lawyer as a client and recommended following his steps. And this is also confirmed by the bank transactions of the manager, who used his Andorran financial network to buy a property in Panama in the luxury residential complex with Ocean Reef helipad and invest in a real estate project on Pedro González island.
Today the victor’s trail has vanished. After being sentenced in 2018 by a Panamanian court to 48 months in prison for moving Odebrecht’s commissions, Cort awaits the outcome of his legal entanglements on probation in the Central American country. He is facing lawsuits in Panama, Andorra and Spain. In all three countries they persecute him for his main skill: putting the construction companies in touch with the most pestilential side of power. The private lawyer declined to answer questions from this newspaper.
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