Guatemala court orders return of Martinelli jet

A Guatemalan court ordered the return of a small plane seized in 2021 from former Panama president Ricardo Martinelli but the aircraft will still remain under the tutelage of a Property Forfeiture court.

The decision to dismiss the seizure of the plane was made on April 21 by the Ninth Criminal Court for Drug Trafficking, which investigated for the alleged transfer of narcotics, at the request of the United States. However, after finding no, only administrative faults, the Ninth Criminal Court for Drug Activity decreed “the return of the jet-type plane”,

According to the judiciary, the representative of the Public Ministry in the process, Enrique Sosa Ordóñez, “did not oppose the return” of the aircraft “as long as it was as a deposit” because “there is an investigation pending by another prosecution”.According to judicial sources, the other prosecutor’s office referred to by the Public Ministry is the Domain Extinction, which has an open process to transfer the aircraft to the possession of the State of Guatemala.

The aircraft, registration N799 RM, was seized on February 26, 2021, at the time Martinelli’s wife arrived in Guatemala, where her sons, Ricardo Alberto and Luis Enrique Martinelli Linares, were in prison, awaiting extradition to the US on charges of money laundering.

The extradition of both was completed at the end of 2021 and the two brothers remain in prison in the United States.

The plane was seized at the La Aurora international airport, located in Guatemala City, when several relatives of the Martinelli brothers, in addition to their mother, were traveling to visit them in the prison where they had been held since 2020.

The Property Forfeiture Law was approved in 2010 in Guatemala and allows local authorities to permanently confiscate assets of illicit origin.