Flap over Trump’s Panama hotel escalates
PANAMA CITY — The majority owner of President Trump’s only hotel in Latin America abruptly ordered Trump employees out of the property on Thursday, triggering a confrontation in which Trump employees refused to leave and asked police to intervene, according to the Trump Organization and local news reports.
This attempt at a takeover by Orestes Fintiklis — a Cypriot businessman based in Miami marked a sharp escalation in his months-old effort to re-brand the Trump International Hotel Panama and replace the Trump Organization as its manager. Fintiklis blames Trump’s brand and Trump’s company for declining revenue and empty rooms.
So far, his tactics had been confined to lawsuits and angry letters.
That changed on Thursday, when Fintiklis and a group of others arrived at the hotel, seeking to deliver letters of termination to the staff. That caused at least one confrontation, which included yelling but no physical altercation, according to a Trump Organization official. The police came, the Trump Organization official said, but did not allow Fintiklis to eject the staff.
At one point, the hotel’s power was turned off, apparently by an ally of Fintiklis, the Trump official said. The power has been restored.
Fintiklis failed to get the Trump employees to leave. Later, his attorney told local reporters that Fintiklis had asked a Panamanian court to issue an order allowing him into the hotel to try to eject the Trump Organization’s employees.
There was no sign he had obtained a court order or a judge’s decision before Thursday’s confrontation at the hotel.
“I was not allowed to have a room in my own hotel,” Fintiklis wrote in a legal complaint that his attorney showed to local reporters, according to a report from the Spanish news service EFE. He complained that Trump hotel employees used “intimidation, threats.”
Alan Garten, an attorney for the Trump Organization, responded with an emailed statement. “We have always been happy to resolve our differences in a civil and professional manner,” he wrote. “The acts by ownership over the last few days however have been pure thuggery.”
By Saturday night, the hotel lobby was quiet: The police were gone, and tourists and residents circulated as usual.
The Trump hotel in Panama is a “hotel condominiumâ,” in essence, its hotel rooms are owned individually by investors, and the owners collectively contract with Trump to manage them.
The dispute began in November, when Fintiklis — whose firm had bought 202 of the hotel’s 369 units last year, and who now heads the condo owners’ association— sought to terminate the Trump Organization as the hotel’s managers. The Trump Organization’s contract won’t be up until 2031.