Former Minister admits to dirty tricks that destroyed lives

The former Minister of the Presidency, Demetrio Jimmy Papadimitriu, admitted that for many years he dedicated himself to carrying out dirty campaigns to destroy the lives of many families around the world.

Papadimitriu, served as Minister of the Presidency between July 2009 and July 2012, in the government of Ricardo Martinelli; He made the confession in a message he published on Twitter, on Monday, September 25. He later deleted it and wrote another to respond to journalist Sabrina Bacal, on the same social network.

The former minister, one of the 36 accused in the Odebrecht case, would be working in the political campaign of Martinelli, who seeks to return to the presidency nominated by his Realizing Goals and Alliance party,

Last Sunday, the day Martinelli announced that his wife Marta Linares would be his running mate. Papadimitriu was at the event in the front row.

He was Martinelli’s campaign manager for the 2009 elections. Before Martinelli allied himself with Juan Carlos Varela to form the presidential roster that brought them to power.

In July 2011, a year before resigning from the Martinelli government, in an interview he gave to La Prensa, he assured that in the cabinet they called him “the Machiavellian Greek.” At that time he said that his relations with some of his fellow ministers were tense.

Those were times when he was considered a super minister. In the Palacio de las Herons nothing happened without his approval, and he himself proclaimed it. “Anyone who wants something to be done will see who has the power and where it has to come,” he once told Barbara Stephenson, former US ambassador, without imagining that this confidence would be laid bare with a Wikileaks leak.

People who worked at his side told La Prensa that while they governed they kept active the strategy that was effective in the campaign, almost with the same actors. In that maneuver, Salomón Salo Shamah, then administrator of the Panama Tourism Authority, had a relevant role.

Shamah was supposedly one of those who organized a call center to attack media outlets, journalists, and critics of the Martinelli government.

SCANDALS 

As he accumulated power, Papadimitriu began to pile up scandals. He managed to get 54 hectares in Juan Hombrón, a paradisiacal beach on the Pacific, titled in his family’s name. Citizen pressure caused the lands to return to the State. He also led the project that involved the purchase of dehydrated food ($60 million) for children in poor schools in the country, a case that was investigated by the Public Ministry.

In the 2014 elections, when Varela won the Presidency Papadimitriu said on television that he had collaborated in that campaign. The campaign of José Domingo Mimito Arias, Martinelli’s presidential candidate, ignored him and instead sought out a political marketing star: Brazilian Joao Santana. In addition to political consultancies, Papadimitriu and Santana share another more thorny issue: both ended up involved in the Odebrecht case.

Papadimitriu’s confession has already begun to dominate the public conversation. Lina Vega, president of the Foundation for the Development of Citizen Freedom, Panama chapter of Transparency International, said on Twitter, that the issue “should provoke some institutional reaction”