American Joseph Stiglitz, co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, has quit an expert commission the Panamanian government created on April 30 to evaluate the country’s financial system in the wake of the Panama Papers leak, officials said.

Swiss expert Mark Pieth, a criminal law and criminology professor at the University of Basel, also has stepped down from the panel, the government said Friday in a statement, without providing details.

Stiglitz resigned because President Juan Carlos Varela’s administration would not allow the committee’s findings to be published without prior screening by the government, according to documents and a letter that one of the other members of the commission sent to Varela and Foreign Minister Isabel De Saint Malo.

In that missive, Costa Rican expert Roberto Artavia noted Article 7 of the commission’s objectives explicitly stated that the government had exclusive authority over all content produced and that the panel’s members were not authorized to publish their results.

He denied that there had been a consensus among the commission’s members to publish their findings independently.

Days after the Panama Papers scandal erupted in early April, Varela said that group of experts had been installed to evaluate the practices of the Central American nation’s financial system, a pillar of the country’s economy along with its logistics and tourism sectors.

It marked the Varela administration’s first response to the huge leak of documents from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca that revealed the names and details of thousands of offshore companies – included ones owned by some of the world’s most powerful people – and raised suspicions about possible tax evasion and concealment of illicit wealth.

The expert panel delivered the government a preliminary report on July 21 that was not released to the public but which, according to officials, focused on six aspects, including availability and access to information and the need to strengthen institutions.

A former administrator of the Panama Canal Authority, Alberto Aleman, who is also a member of the panel, said on Twitter that Stiglitz and Pieth had resigned “because they wanted to set a global example around the PanamaPapers. That was NOT our mandate. We’re acting independently and transparently.” EFE

Panama City, Aug 6 (EFE)