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The head of a big offshore investment firm that maintained an office
in San José more than five years ago has been arrested and taken for
trial to the United States.
The man is Marc M. Harris, who headed a Panamá-based organization
of the same name. He was flying high in 1997 and early 1998 and held
seminars in San José for which investors paid up to $500, according
to a businessman here who remembers Harris.
The public plan was to create vast networks of tax avoidance for
U.S. citizens. In fact, a Miami reporter uncovered his operation as
a ponzi scheme in which old investors were paid with money placed by
new investors — minus whatever Harris took off the top.
That story was published in Offshore
Alerts March 31, 1998, and led to the downfall of Harris’
empire. The reporter was David Marchant,
who reported Wednesday that he attended a court hearing for Harris
in Miami where the former investment whiz kid was presented to the
court in handcuffs and leg shackles.
For Marchant it was a second
victory. Harris and his companies sued Marchant after his 1998 story
appeared and claimed libel. A U.S. district court judge eventually
said the story appeared to be well-documented and truthful, and
Harris lost a plea to the U.S. Court of Appeals.
Harris was doing business in Managua under the name of Mitchell
Astor Gilbert Trust Co. He moved there last year. In June a landlord
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