Martinelli facing girlfriend harassment investigation

Former Panama president Ricardo Martinelli is being investigated in Spain in a case of espionage and harassment of a woman for which eleven people were arrested, four of them policemen, on the island of Mallorca (Balearic Islands), official sources informed the AFP Newsagency on Thursday.

According to  Spanish media, the victim is a woman with whom Martinelli had an extra-marital relationship and whom he commissioned agents to spy on when she was on vacation on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca in July 2020.

“In total, 11 people were arrested, four of them from the Civil Guard, for being part of a criminal group and harassing a woman”, whose identity was not revealed nor was her relationship with Martinelli, a spokesman for the told AFP in Palma, capital of Mallorca.

These people, arrested between Monday and Tuesday of this week, acted “at the request of a person from Panama,” said the spokesman, without further details.

According to legal sources confirmed to AFP, former President Martinelli – who is already being tried in Spain for a case of alleged corruption – is being investigated for this case.

The Spanish press, citing sources from the investigation, affirms that it was Martinelli who commissioned the shadowing of the woman.

Group Cougar
The detainees, who called themselves “Group Cougar”, watched and followed the woman in Palma and on the beaches she visited, and even spied on her from jet skis when she was on a boat, according to the newspaper El Mundo.

The woman found out and reported the incident to the police.

Two of the detainees, one of them a civil guard, were placed in preventive detention and the others were released with precautionary measures, such as the withdrawal of their passport, reported to the Superior Court of Justice of the Balearic Islands .

Martinelli, Panamanian president between 2009 and 2014, is being tried in Spain for allegedly receiving bribes from the Spanish construction company FCC in exchange for contracts for public works during his government.

Testifying by videoconference in December before the Audiencia Nacional, a high jurisdiction in Madrid, the 70-year-old former president denied accusations of corruption and money laundering.

Martinelli, singled out in various investigations for corruption during his administration, was acquitted last November by a Panamanian court in a case in which he was accused of having illegally spied on opponents through the National Security Council (CSN) during his term. For these same acts, two former directors of the CSN were each sentenced to 60 months in prison.