Jailed scam mans cars to be returned says lawyer
Panamanian , authorities will have to return three cars a Maserati, Lamborghini and a Ferrari after a case against David Murcia Guzman for laundering drug money was dismissed by the Panamanian courts according to his lawyer.
Two other cars have already been sold at auction. His lawyer Roniel Ortiz said the authorities will also have to hand over a yacht and bank accounts held by Murcia.
Not that they will be of much use to him for a while. Murcia is sitting in a U.S. jail awaiting trial on money laundering charges and is also serving a more than 30 year sentence imposed on him in Columbia after being convicted in a pyramid fraud case. He also faces a other charges on multiple accounts in Panama
Murcia's defense attorney, said that the that the state could not prove Murcia’s link with crime or with drug trafficker Juan Carlos Ramirez Abadia, alias "Lollipop" or with FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
Murcia was charged in Panama for allegedly receiving funds from "Lollipop" during operations to make money from pyramid schemes using the Panamanian banking system.
In addition to money laundering, Murcia is being processed in Panama for getting millions of dollars from people in Panama in a pyramid scheme through his company DMG.
Last December, Murcia was sentenced in Colombia to more than 30 years in prison for illegal collection of money and extradited to the United States to face charges of money laundering.
Murcia was the founder of DMG, which brought together more than twenty companies in Colombia and tried to expand into neighboring countries with a giant scam which led to him being described as the Colombian Madoff.
He also played a role in the electoral defeat of Bobby Velasquez, who was leading in the polls in the campaign for city mayor, until Murcia claimed, from his jail cell in Colombia, that he had given $6 million to Velasquez and presidential candidate Balbina Hererra, to help their election campaigns.
The allegations were never proved, but Velasquez slipped from leading to being a runner up, and Panama got Bosco Vallarino as mayor.
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