Former US-Panama launderer released
MARC HARRIS, an unlicensed, high rolling American financial adviser who from his lush offices on Avenida Balboa, helped American citizens avoid taxes has been released from a U.S. prison.
Harris ran a financial services company in Panama without any license or permit issued by a regulatory authority.
When the FBI was closing in on him, Alejandro Moncada Luna, who later became a Supreme Court Judge and is now in jail for corruption, refused to cooperate.
Documents of the Southern District Court of Florida reported that Harris was released in August after his sentence was reduced for unspecified reasons.
According to the Web site at OffShore Alert, he was released on Aug. 15 and can reside in Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, New York or Rhode Island without judicial authorization.
In a November 2003 trial in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a jury found Harris guilty of 16 charges of money laundering, tax evasion and conspiracy to defraud.
In May 2004, Judge James Cohn sentenced him to 17 years in prison and fined him $26.9 million. He was 38 at the time.
OffShore Alert was the first publication that warned about the irregular activities of The Harris Organization in Panama.
It said that investors, mainly Americans, were in danger of losing their money.
From his spacious offices on Avenida Balboa, Harris operated outside the margins of any regulation reports La Prensa.
FBI complaint
In 2000, a complaint against Harris was filed with then-Attorney General José Antonio Sossa on behalf of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
In this application, the FBI required collaboration to investigate ties between Harris and two confessed drug traffickers, who indicated that they invested their money in The Harris Organization.
Sossa instructed the head of the Technical Judicial Police, Alejandro Moncada Luna, to cooperate with the Americans, but he refused to do so.
He would later be removed from his post and a decade later would be appointed to the Supreme Court, a job he would also lose due to a corruption investigation.
Harris was arrested in June 2003 in Managua, Nicaragua, and deported to the United States.
