Panama issues an arrest warrant for Richard Fifer and Ken Morgan of ex-Petaquilla Gold (ex-PTQ)
Ahh, y'see, told you it would end badly.
All this ex- Prez Martinelli corruption scandal thing has finally caught up to the deals he did with Richard Fifer of Petaquilla, now hiding in Brazil or Spain (we've had versions on both countries recently) after absconding from Panama before the law caught up with him. We're now at the point where their dirty deals are being uncovered, such as the one that's making First Quantum sweat hard now. What seems to have transpired is that Petaquilla first sold a couple of concessions to one company (Golden Dragon) and then sold them to First Quantum without telling them the Golden Dragon deal, which for one thing is fraud and for another can ruin your weekend if you need that terrain to build your massive copper mine and then Golden Dragon come along and say "Errrr....no...that's mine actually" at the end.
So the brains behind the double deal, Richard Fifer (of course) and Ken Morgan, a Vancouver CA who was the CFO of PTQ at the time, had criminal charges filed against them by Golden Dragon quite a while ago. That's normal under the circumstances, but what's new news is that the State of Panama apparently agrees with the Golden Dragon side of things and has issued arrest warrants for both Morgan and Fifer. And what with Fifer doing his impersonation of The Scarlet Pimpernel these days, I betcha that they'll find the must-easier-to-tace Morgan first. That shouldn't take long either, as Panama has just requested that Interpol Intervene (as it were), arrest Morgan and ship him back to Panama (which could happen at any moment but is most likely to happen when Morgan tries to cross an international border).
Bottom line: We always knew Fifer was a crook, the fun thing now is to see how First Quantum manages when they tell the world that a key location of Panama Cobre isn't theirs and the real owners, Golden Dragon, don't want to sell.
