President Donald Trump's company appealed to Panama's president to intervene after its hotel business management team was evicted from a luxury hotel in the country.
Related: Trump's Name Should Be Stripped From Panama Hotel, Its Owners Say
Britton & Iglesias, the firm representing the Trump Organization, on March 22 sent a letter, obtained by The Associated Press Monday, to Panama's President Juan Carlos Varela stating that they "URGENTLY request your influence in relation to a commercial dispute involving Trump Hotel aired before Panama's judiciary."
The move has struck further alarm bells with ethics experts already concerned by conflicts of interest within the Trump administration.
"This could be the clearest example we've seen of a conflict of interest stemming from the president's role as head of state in connection with other countries and his business interests," Danielle Brian, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, told the AP.
The hotel's majority owner Orestes Fintiklis attempted to get rid of Trump's management team in February and the courts agreed on March 5 despite the Trump Organization's efforts to boost security. Trump's name was removed from the waterfront property the same day and has been renamed The Bahia Grand Panama.
In their letter to Varela, lawyers argued that judicial officials violated a bilateral treaty by denying the management team. Five days later, on March 27, an arbitrator based in the U.S. concluded that Trump's management team should not have been booted while the dispute continued, but that he would not put the team back in the hotel.
The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Newsweek on Monday.
Panama's foreign secretary Isabel de Saint Malo told The Associated Press that the letter "urges Panama's executive branch to interfere in an issue clearly of the judicial branch."
"I don't believe the executive branch has a position to take while the issue is in the judicial process," she said.
El Ridiculo intento de “ bullying” del grupo empresarial del Presidente de EU hacia nuestro Presidente merece la respuesta firme y definitiva q le dieron!
— Roberto Eisenmann (@RobertoEisen) April 9, 2018
In court documents filed in Florida, Fintiklis claimed that the Trump Organization mismanaged the hotel and caused expenses to "bloat" as well as occupancy "to collapse."
The Trump Organization's "gross incompetence and deficient sales organization stands in the way of [the] owner making any profit on its investment, all the while lining the [Trump Organization's] pockets," Fintiklis argued in the filing obtained by ABC News.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
A Los Angeles native, Jessica Kwong grew up speaking Spanish, Cantonese and English, in that order. Her journalism career started ... Read more
