Panama: Trump hotel standoff ends as president surrenders physical control

Executives with Donald Trump’s family hotel business have abandoned the management offices of a luxury hotel in Panama that has been the scene of a tense, 12-day standoff over a business dispute with the hotel’s owners. Trump’s security guards also left the property.

The action took place as a Panamanian judicial official and armed police escorted into the offices the owner of most of the units of the 70-storey, Trump-branded hotel in Panama City.

The legal dispute involving Trump’s company was expected to continue, but Monday’s developments meant that Trump had effectively surrendered physical control of the property.

“This was purely a commercial dispute that just spun out of control,” said Orestes Fintiklis, a private equity investor and the head of the hotel’s owners’ association, shortly before entering the hotel management’s offices. “And today this dispute has been settled by the authorities and the judges of this country.”

A Panamanian judicial official told the AP a statement would come later in the day.

The intervention resolves the standoff between Trump’s family hotel business and Fintiklis, who sought to take physical control of the property on behalf of the hotel owners.

Though the owners tried to fire Trump’s company last year, the Trump Organization had disputed the termination as legally invalid – and refused to hand over the property.

Source: theguardian