Police handcuff security guard at Trump hotel

PANAMA CITY >> Panamanian police on Tuesday handcuffed a security guard working for President Donald Trump’s hotel in Panama City, Panama, in the midst of a dispute in which the hotel’s majority owner has tried to fire the Trump Organization, and Trump employees have refused to leave.

The security guard was brought down an elevator by a contingent of police who arrived at the luxury hotel on Monday morning. The police then drove him away in a patrol car.

A police commander at the scene said the guard had been detained for denying officers access to an area of the hotel. It was unclear whether he had been formally arrested. The commander declined to be identified.

The detention marked the latest escalation in a standoff that began Thursday. That afternoon, the hotel’s majority owner, Orestes Fintiklis, made a sudden attempt to terminate the Trump Organization’s contract to manage the facility. Fintiklis blames the organization — and the U.S. president’s polarizing brand — for the hotel’s declining revenue.

Since that first confrontation, there been yelling matches, barricaded offices and some shoving in a hotel backroom. The two sides have accused each other of lying and “mobstyle” tactics. Fintiklis has sought to draw the Panamanian government into the dispute; raising questions about how the leadership of a U.S. ally would handle a confrontation with the American president’s private business.

On Tuesday, Fintiklis appeared to believe that he had won a round. Visits by the police — and by officials from Panama’s Labor Ministry — seemed to indicate that Fintiklis has secured the help of the Panamanian government.

After the guard’s detention, Fintiklis sat down at the piano in the hotel’s lobby and played Beethoven’s “Für Elise.”

“I’m a multi-talented mobster,” he said afterward, a joking reference to the Trump Organization’s allegation that he had used “mob-style” tactics.

On Tuesday, a worker at the scene sent videos from the hotel — apparently taken before police arrived — that seemed to show a physical altercation between several men in a back-office room filled with computers. The owners of the building have accused Trump Organization employees of blocking access to that room, which is supposed to be shared with non-Trump staffers.

A day earlier, Panama’s federal prosecutors said they had opened an investigation into the Trump Organization, after Fintiklis complained that he had been unlawfully blocked from his own property.

With that, this bizarre standoff turned a theoretical concern about the Trump administration — that, someday, the president’s private business might be investigated by a foreign government — into a reality.

“The fear has always been that there would be an international incident involving the finances of the president, and the president would have his loyalties questioned,” said Jordan Libowitz of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

“What kind of pressure would he be willing to place on them?” Libowitz asked, referring to foreign authorities.

The White House press office has not responded to questions sent about the standoff at Trump Panama. The U.S. Embassy in Panama City and the Panamanian Foreign Ministry declined to comment, saying they were not involved.

Fintiklis also has declined to provide detailed comments.

Trump said he has handed over day-to-day control of his companies to his sons, Eric and Donald Jr. But the president still owns his businesses and can withdraw money from them at any time, documents show.

On Monday, the Trump Organization issued a statement about the standoff in Panama, accusing Fintiklis and his allies of “mob-style” tactics and of ignoring ongoing court actions over the future of the property.

“It now appears as though Mr. Fintiklis has either lost patience with the pace of the proceedings which he commenced or simply lacks the financial backing he once claimed he had,” the statement said.

The Trump Organization’s contract to manage the hotel extends to 2031.

The hotel shares space with residential condominiums in a 70-story tower that resembles a billowing sail.

Since his election in November 2016, Trump’s polarizing politics appear to have taken a toll on a number of his businesses; hurting those in liberal cities and some places overseas. In two such places — Toronto and Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood — the owners of Trumpbranded hotels cut ties last year with the Trump Organization, found new managers and dropped the Trump name.

But those endings were amicable.

The dispute in Panama is not.

The fight over the hotel here began last year, when Fintiklis — a Cypriot businessman based in Miami — bought 202 of the hotel’s 369 units. The business is structured as a “hotel condominium,” in which the rooms were sold individually, and the condo owners collectively contract with the Trump Organization to run the hotel.