Panama’s WAR on France!

NOW the French have really gone too far. Huh? Yes. The nation of garlic eaters has had the audacity to call our drug trafficking, money laundering, totally corrupt and amateurish third world hellhole a TAX HAVEN!!!! How dare they!

Not that the rich or foreign corporate front corporations here pay any taxes, or that France is wrong or anything, but that's not the point. The point is that Martinelli needs a distraction from his own mobster deals with Berlusconi and Mulino involving outdated radar equipment and rusty wrecks that were once patrol boats, and because we can't make a real war we'll do a symbolic one, on the French. Drum-roll! Gloire de la Patrie!

So what happened that it has come this far? Nothing, really. Sarko met the Narco, and promised him he'd take Panama off the list of non-cooperative tax havens as soon as a double taxation treaty was ratified. And then one of Sarko's ministers said that Panama is still a tax haven. Duh. Tell us something new. And now the Panamanians want to strike back with a new super-weapon, named "medidas de retorsión". In practice this means that French banks can no longer guarantee a loan by CitiBank of $297,8 million to Panama to pay for the metro project.

Well, that's a first battle won by France right there if you ask us. Who wants to guarantee a loan by a bank as stupid as CitiBank for an even more stupid project - the metro - done by a government that will most likely just steal all the money and leave France holding the bag then anyway?

We can't wait to see the rest of this war. Few people know this, but the Eiffel Tower was actually built with money that was more or less stolen from the French Panama Canal company. Any guesses what else the clever Gauls may have up their sleeves?