Lead Editor – Newsgathering[email protected]PANAMA CITY—Finance Minister Davendranath Tancoo has pushed back against criticism of the Government’s US$1 billion bond issue, insisting the borrowing is backed by future revenue and not a case of passing today’s debt onto another administration. Speaking in Panama during CAF’s Latin America and the Caribbean International Economic Forum 2026, Tancoo framed the bond against what he described as an inherited problem—a US$1 billion bond raised in 2016 with no repayment mechanism in place. “When a former finance minister took a US$1 billion bond in 2016, he put nothing in place to repay it,” Tancoo said. Tancoo rejected that characterisation, arguing the difference lay in the measures now being put in place to generate repayment capacity. A third pillar, he said, was closing what the IMF had identified as a $10 billion tax gap by improving compliance rather than raising new taxes.