Shackled Martinelli denied bail

SHACKLED, unshaven and dressed in prison overalls, Panama’s former  president Ricardo Martinelli, shuffled into  a Miami Court on Tuesday, June 13, to hear Federal Judge Edwin G. Torres refuse bail, while a lawyer repeated Martinelli’s “political persecution mantra

He will remain behind bars in a Miami-Dade County Detention Center until a bond hearing, scheduled for June 20.

Martinelli,  was arrested Monday on the basis of an extradition request from  to Panama to respond to charges of illegal surveillance and embezzlement

The Miami Herald reported that Attorney Marcos Jimenez argued that an effort to extradite him was part of a smear campaign by political foes to prevent him from seeking the nation’s top office again.

Jimenez, challenged charges levelled by the Panamanian government that more than $13 million intended for a poverty program had been diverted to pay for a secret surveillance operation that Martinelli used to spy on his political opponents.

“It’s being instigated by the current president [Juan Carlos] Varela],” said Jimenez who questioned the timing of the arrest on an extradition complaint, which he said came after Martinelli declared his intentions to run for a second presidential term.

Jimenez also asked that Martinelli be released on bond and placed under house arrest while awaiting a final decision by U.S. courts on Panama’s extradition request

Jimenez further said the former Panamanian president suffers from poor health and is not a flight risk since he has been living openly in Miami.

“Detention is egregiously improper,” Jimenez, a former U.S. attorney, told the judge in a packed courtroom. The former president, who governed Panama from 2009 to 2014, appeared in court in a khaki jail uniform with his wrists and ankles shackled and looking unshaven.

Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres set a bond hearing for June 20 but cautioned that bail is “a pretty difficult thing to get” in extradition cases.

The former president is accused of intercepting and recording the private conversations of political allies and opponents, judges, journalists, businessmen, union activists, and even his mistress, according to a complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Miami, which cited Panama’s extradition request.

Martinelli “created and oversaw a sophisticated program” using national security personnel and equipment purchased with public funds to carry out the surveillance, “learning intimate details” of the personal and professional lives of his targets, according to the complaint, which was unsealed after Martinelli’s arrest.

Martinelli has been charged in Panama with embezzlement, interception of communications, and tracking, persecution and surveillance without judicial authorization, the complaint says. The former president “secretly commandeered” Panama’s National Security Council and created a covert unit that spied on Martinelli’s targets from the top floor of a security council building, according to the complaint.

Sex tapes
The money used to pay for the surveillance system — about $13.4 million — had been allocated to a fund that was supposed to “improve the quality of life for underprivileged persons,” the complaint says. Instead, the funds bankrolled intelligence gathering operations that produced daily reports for Martinelli and sometimes gleaned “particularly sensational audio or video,” including political opponents having sex, that the complaint says Martinelli instructed security personnel to upload to YouTube.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Jimenez questioned the validity of Panama’s extradition request, stating that the extradition treaty between the United States and Panama does not cover the wiretapping charges he faces. The merits of Panama’s extradition request will be heard in federal court later this summer.

Martinelli has maintained that the allegations against him are politically motivated. In a statement issued Monday night, a spokesman for Martinelli said the extradition request is “running its normal course.”

Martinelli fled to the United States in 2015 just days after his country’s Supreme Court opened an investigation into separate allegations that he had helped embezzle $45 million from a government school lunch program. The former president initially settled in the Atlantis, a luxury condominium tower on  Miami’s Brickell Avenue concludes the Miami Herald