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Excerpt: |
Also at that time, Harris had been disparaged as little more than a
pyramid scheme by Offshore Alert,
an investors’ newsletter, after its editor and publisher
David Marchant had been asked by an
American investor to look into the validity of Harris’s claims. In
Panama, La Prensa published similar tales. In each case a key source
of information was Gilberto Boutin. Harris, through two of his many
companies, filed a multi-million-dollar libel suit against
Marchant
in a Florida federal district court and pressed criminal charges
against four La Prensa journalists for criminal defamation and theft
of company documents. These cases were pending and substantial sums
were being paid to lawyers to defend against Harris’s attacks.
Adding to the ethical questions in play was the fact that Gilberto
Boutin was then a member of La Prensa's board of directors.
After some heated arguments at The Panama News, Morland decided that
the newspaper would not publish anything at all about Marc Harris.
The argument recurred several times as events around Harris
repeatedly became newsworthy, most notably over the Wagman affair.
Eventually Harris’s suit against
Marchant was dismissed with a
scathing opinion by a judge who essentially decided that the
evidence showed that Harris was a crook and Marchant’s stories about
him were valid. Much later, Harris’s charges against La Prensa's
Mónica Palm, Miren Gutiérrez, Rolando Rodríguez and Gustavo Gorriti
were also rejected by a Panamanian court......But meanwhile over
at El Panama America, Marc Harris was still being treated as a hero.
He still is.
On January 14 and 15, 2001, the paper ran a long interview with
Harris by Mario Castro Arenas, proclaiming in its headline that
Harris had started out with $5,000 and built a billion-dollar
business. The billion dollars under Harris management was one of the
specific claims that David Marchant's stories disputed (he said it
was more like $40 million) and over which Harris had sued
Marchant
for libel and lost. The story called Harris "one of the financiers
who's best prepared to analyze the new financial regulations pressed
for by the economic powers of the FATF," commented on his youthful
appearance, displayed a photo of Harris with a portrait of Che
Guevara in the background and delved at length into Harris's
philosophy of "individual sovereignty." There were no hard questions
about the cloud of scandal surrounding Harris. In the first
installment, two entire pages of the business section, there was no
hint at all of any controversy.
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