The Swiss expert in the fight against corruption, Mark Pieth, revealed to the BBC chain that resigned the Commission promoted by the Government of President Juan Carlos Varela, following the Panama Papers scandal, "due to the interference of the Government".
Such a Commission had been set up on April 29, and was presented as a "Committee of independent experts" to evaluate the practices of financial services in the country, after allegations of massive laundering by the firm Mossack Fonseca.
But the Commission´s autonomy, as the Government boasted at the beginning, is now being questioned, as some pressures by the Executive for the consultancy results not to become public have been known.
With sensitive revelations to the program NewsHour of the BBC, Mark Pieth said that he had received a letter from the Government officials of Panama in which it was warned that the Government would have the last word as to the publication or not of this report.
"We were told they were going to decide if in the end it [the report] was going to be known or not," said the expert.
"I think that the officials were in a state of denial. Basically they were saying 'well what we have been seeing with the Panama Papers is something that is observed around the world' ", Pieth affirmed.
Meanwhile Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, also resigned this initiative, whose initial search for transparency now is being strongly challenged, especially by the international media.
Stiglitz said to the News Agency Reuters that he was concerned that the Commission´s report would not be published.
"It makes no sense to have a Committee on transparency, which is not transparent", said the Nobel Prize in a telephone interview with Acan-Efe, after his resignation and that of Mark Pieth, professor of criminal law and criminology of the University of Basel who was hired by Varela.
Stiglitz was emphatic in ensuring that they agreed to join the group and assumed that the Government would be willing to publish the full results.
Among Stiglitz´s proposals that could worry the Government was the creation of a public registry of all the final beneficiaries of the corporations registered, which in his view, makes one of the main shortcomings of the system in Panama, as became evident after the revelations of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca´s Panama Papers.
But not all of the Committee members think like Stiglitz and Pieth. Panamanians, Nicolas Ardito Barletta and Alberto German Zubieta, as well as Costa Rican, Roberto Arcadia, coincide in that Stiglitz and Pieth have an agenda.
In Barletta´s view, both wanted to make a report to announce it to the world when what is expected is that the Committee, in principle, surrender accounts to Panama.
Alberto Aleman Zubieta, Vice-Chairman of the Committee, reacted in learning about Stiglitz and Pieth´s leaving the Commission and said that their resignations were given "since they wanted to hear what the world was saying around Panama Papers. This was not what the Commission was assigned for. We act independently and transparently".
However, yesterday the President of the National Association of Lawyers, Jose Alberto Alvarez, described as "terrible" the resignation of these two experts, due to a lack of transparency.
