PANAMA CITY—Panamanian police on Tuesday handcuffed a security guard working for U.S. President Donald Trump’s hotel here, 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 “mob-style” tactics. And 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 “Fur 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 has also declined to provide detailed comments.

President Trump says 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 Trump-branded 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.

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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.

In his most recent personal financial disclosure, Trump said his company had received $810,000 in management fees over the preceding 15 ½ months.

The Trump Organization said that, when he bought the units, Fintiklis had explicitly agreed not to try to fire the company as the hotel’s manager.

But late last year, he did.

Fintiklis took over the hotel condo owners association and moved to terminate the Trump Organization’s contract. His argument — made in letters to tenants — has been that the hotel’s finances were so bad that the Trump Organization had effectively broken its promise to manage the facility well.

“It should be clear to all of us,” Fintiklis wrote a few weeks ago, “that our investment has no future” with the Trump Organization brand on it. Some hotel-unit owners have reported that their properties are occupied less than 30 per cent of the time.

Until last week, the dispute seemed likely to play out at the glacial speed of legal proceedings. There was a lawsuit in New York and an arbitration case.

But then Fintiklis made his move.

“Mr. Fintiklis arrived in Panama with a rogue private security team and others and launched a co-ordinated attack to physically take over the management of the Hotel,” the Trump Organization said in its statement, recounting last Thursday’s attempted takeover.

Fintiklis does not appear to have obtained a court’s permission to take over the hotel.

Two people familiar with Fintiklis’s account said that, after his arrival, hotel employees barricaded office doors with furniture, and they added that documents were shredded. The two people said Trump Organization employees — including an executive who flew down from New York City — also blocked access to a control room that houses servers and surveillance-camera monitors.

This room, the two people said, is shared by the hotel operation and the managers of the residential side of the building, which is no longer operated by the Trump Organization. The two spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing legal proceedings.

In response, building administrators — who do not work for the Trump Organization — temporarily cut power Friday to the portion of the building that houses the surveillance room. Throughout the day, there were problems with cable TV and internet service.

On Monday afternoon, an attorney for Fintiklis attempted to serve citations to nine hotel employees summoning them to the Labor Ministry, but hotel security guards denied him access, according to owners in the building with knowledge of the dispute.

Fintiklis’s attorney went to Panamanian prosecutors Friday, complaining that Trump Organization staffers had used “intimidation and threats” to block his client from his own building. That complaint was what triggered the prosecutors’ promise to investigate.

In a letter to employees of the hotel sent Sunday afternoon, Fintiklis sought to turn them to his side — saying they had been misled and betrayed by a few officials who were serving the Trump Organization, rather than the hotel’s owners.

“Now it must be clear to all of you that the Trump Organization, in an effort to win some financial and strategic gains over me and the other owners, has lied to you and put your work at the hotel in grave risk,” he wrote. “You have been victims of a horrible lie.”

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