The president of Panama, José Raúl Molino, threatened on Tuesday to veto EU companies from future tenders in his country if the European bloc does not remove him from its list of tax havens. “Panama will not allow any country that keeps us on that list to participate in the international tenders that we have from next year,” Mulino warned at the end of his official visit to France.

In an interview granted from a Parisian hotel to three media, Mulino gave a deadline for the EU to remove Panama from the list until mid-2025 and assured that, for the moment, this retaliation that is being considered adopting “is already hard enough”.

The main tender that is at stake is the railway of about 400 kilometers between the capital, Panama City, and David, next to the border with Costa Rica, for an estimated amount of at least 4 billion dollars.

“We are in a whole lobbying process to be able to tell our truth, verify it with figures and be able to tell Europe and the OECD that they are lying about the condition of Panama as a country” considered a tax haven, he said. The president argued that his nation “does not sponsor money laundering” and pointed out that, since assuming the Panamanian presidency on July 1, they have responded “promptly” to the requests made to the financial authorities of his country.

Although Panama left the gray list of the International Financial Action Task Force (FATF, based in Paris) in October 2023, it still remains on the European Union list. Mulino pointed to the European Parliament as “the main obstacle”. “For reasons I don’t know, we didn’t vote in favor of Panama months ago,” he lamented.

The Panamanian president insisted on the defense of his country’s international reputation, seriously affected by the scandal of extraterritorial companies known as Panama Papers of 2016. “Panama is cooperating in what it can cooperate and it is not true that we are a country to be stigmatized the way they have done it (…) We will do what we have to do to be able to dignify our name and clean our image here in Europe and where appropriate,” he said.