The Third Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice declared, in a unanimous ruling dated March 6, 2024, that Resolution SBP-0016-2018 of February 26, 2018, issued by the Superintendency of Banks of Panama (SBP), as well as its amending and confirmatory acts, is not illegal. The decision brings to a close the full-jurisdiction administrative contentious proceedings that a general-license banking entity had brought before that court, and it denies all of the plaintiff's claims. Justice Cecilio Cedalise Riquelme served as the writing judge; Justices María Cristina Chen Stanziola and Carlos Alberto Vásquez Reyes joined the unanimous opinion.

The SBP had sanctioned the banking entity through Resolution SBP-0016-2018 with two fines: B/.492,000.00 for infringing the regime for the prevention of money laundering, terrorist financing, and the financing of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction — based on Articles 26, 27, 28, and 38 of Law 23 of 2015 and Agreement 10-2015 — and B/.300,000.00 for violations of the banking regime — pursuant to Agreements 8-2010, 5-2011, and 7-2011. The infractions were detected during comprehensive inspections conducted between August and November 2015 and between August and September 2016. Following a motion for reconsideration, the SBP reduced both sanctions through Resolution SBP-0060-2021: the penalty related to the anti-laundering regime was reduced to B/.164,000.00 and the banking-regime penalty to B/.100,000.00. The SBP's Board of Directors confirmed that reduced decision through Resolution SBP-JD-0008-2022, exhausting the administrative appeal process.

The banking entity's central argument before the Third Chamber was that the Superintendency violated the principles of due process and strict legality by grounding the sanction in findings from inspections conducted after the initial charge formulation, and that correction of the detected deficiencies should have exempted it from any fine. The Chamber rejected both arguments. On the procedural point, the court found that the SBP had given prior notice of each inspection, granted the statutory periods for filing answers and evidence during the charge-formulation phases — Resolutions SBP-0207-2016 and SBP-0035-2017 — and that the bank had effectively exercised that right. The Chamber also noted that the supervisory powers of the Superintendent of Banks, established in Article 16 of Decree-Law 9 of 1998, allow the initiation of additional inspections and the filing of new charges during an ongoing investigation, without that constituting a due-process violation.

The most significant regulatory aspect of the ruling is the principle it establishes regarding the function of fines within the money-laundering prevention regime. The Third Chamber underscored that the obligations imposed by Law 23 of 2015 and SBP Agreement 10-2015 require ongoing compliance: supervised banks are required to maintain, at all times and throughout any inspection, the controls, policies, and procedures necessary to prevent their operations from being used in money-laundering or terrorist-financing activities. The court specified that the subsequent correction of findings — although recognized and taken into account by the SBP when it reduced the sanctions — does not extinguish the infraction or neutralize the regulator's sanctioning authority, citing Article 184 of the Unified Banking Law. The decision also affirms the SBP's power to publish the operative part of its sanctioning acts pursuant to Article 189 of the same text, even while the affected entity pursues judicial proceedings, and consolidates the standard that anti-laundering compliance does not admit retroactive correction as a substitute for the sanction.