• Submitted by: lena campos
• Society
• 10 / 11 / 2013

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An elderly Panamanian businessman has been jailed in Cuba for more than a year in what is variously described as a case of corruption or attempts by Havana to renege on its debts or switch more of its trade to businessmen from politically sympathetic countries.

Nessin Abadi, in his early 70s and owner of the large Audiofoto chain of electronics stores, was arrested around August of last year but has not been tried or even charged, according to friends and business contacts in Panama City.

Relatives have kept the case out of the news media because of fears that the Cuban government will retaliate against him, the sources said. The family declined a request for an interview or information on the case.

But the public records of Panama’s foreign ministry show Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Franco spent $1,551.42 on a trip to Havana on October 7-8, 2012, to talk to Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez about “the Nessin Abadi case.”

The ministry did not respond to calls for comment for the story.

Abadi, part of a large family of Syrian Jews who migrated to Panama in the early 1900s, had been selling Asian-made electronic, household and other goods and equipment to the Cuban government for many years out of Panama’s duty-free Colon Free Zone (CFZ).

He has been detained in several homes in Havana run by the interior ministry and one jail, and interrogated almost daily by ministry investigators but has not been charged, according to his friends and business contacts.

Cuban officials told relatives during the few contacts they have been allowed that he is suspected of corruption, added the sources, who said they were outraged by Abadi’s jailing but asked to remain anonymous because of the family’s wishes.

The government of Raul Castro jailed at least a dozen foreign businessmen in Havana in 2011 and 2012 in what he painted as a crackdown on corruption so prevalent on the island that it was endangering the future of the communist government.

CFZ businessmen said that Abadi has a reputation for total honesty and that they suspected Cuba arrested him to avoid paying its debt to him - and to send a message to its other debtors in Panama to await any late payments patiently and keep their mouths shut.

Cuba’s total debt to CFZ business owners is not known because there is no central clearing system, but it is considered to be significant because “it is increasingly becoming more and more difficult to collect from Cuba,” said one Panamanian businessman.

For Cuba to accuse foreign businessmen of corruption is “like calling the kettle black,” he added.

“What happened is that there is no law in Cuba. These international investors served their useful purpose and now they are being burned by the government.”

A similar argument was made last month by Stephen Purvis, a British businessman arrested in Havana in 2011, jailed for 15 months, tried this June and sentenced essentially to time served. He is now back in England.

Although reporters in Havana were told that Purvis was under investigation for corruption, he wrote in a letter to the British magazine The Economist last month that he was verbally accused of revealing state secrets and other violations, but never corruption.

Instead, he wrote, he was convicted of “various supposed breaches of financial regulations,” charges that could easily be filed against any of the several other foreign businessmen he met in jails in Havana.

Few of those cases “have been reported in the press and there are many more in the system than is widely known,” Purvis wrote. “As they are all still either waiting for charges, trial or sentencing they will certainly not be talking to the press.”

Source: Gulf-times.com