Ricardo Martinelli
Ricardo Martinelli was president of Panama from 2009 to 2014, the owner of the Super 99 supermarket chain and the country's richest politician, who won the election of May 2009 with sixty per cent, the largest margin since the invasion, on the promise to govern as a businessman. His five years were the boom. There was growth of nine per cent a year, the highest in the Americas. There were the Canal's third set of locks under construction, the Panama City metro, the first in Central America, opened in April 2014 a month before he left. There were the coastal highway, the hospitals, the cash transfer to the old, the copper mine at Cobre Panamá contracted, the cranes on every skyline. There was the corruption that the boom paid for, in the contracts of the Brazilian builder Odebrecht, which confessed in 2016 to fifty-nine million dollars of bribes in Panama. It was in the Italian Finmeccanica radar and helicopter deal, and in the pardons, the wiretaps and the public-works commissions that became a dozen prosecutions when he left. He was born in Panama City in 1952 to an Italian-descended family of Chitré, studied at the Staunton military academy in Virginia and business at Arkansas, worked for Citibank. He bought a small supermarket in 1980 and made it the country's largest chain, ran the social security fund under Pérez Balladares and the Canal Authority's board. He founded the Democratic Change party in 1998, losing the election of 2004 with five per cent before winning that of 2009. He left the country in January 2015 as the supreme court opened the wiretapping case, in which his security council had listened to a hundred and fifty opponents, journalists and lovers, was arrested in Miami in June 2017 and extradited in June 2018. He was acquitted of the wiretaps in 2019 and again in 2021. He was convicted in July 2023 of laundering the money used to buy the Editora Panamá América newspaper group, for which he was sentenced to ten years and barred from the election of 2024, in which his running mate Mulino was elected in his place with his face on the posters. He took refuge in the Nicaraguan embassy in Panama City in February 2024 for fifteen months. He was given a safe-conduct to Colombia by Mulino's government in May 2025 and asylum there. He lives in Bogotá, from which he posts, and from which his sons, who served American sentences for the Odebrecht money, have come home to the assembly.
- Lived: 1952 CE – ?
- Nationality: Panamanian
- Roles: president, businessman, politician
