Somewhere in Guatemala City, a labor court has decided that a corporate insider is worth more, by the month, than Cristiano Ronaldo, Stephen Curry, and LeBron James combined. Not a typo. According to his own complaint, a former Tigo Guatemala executive wants his severance calculated on an “average monthly salary” of $4.47 million — a figure that would put him among the five highest-paid athletes on the planet, except he never played a professional sport. He ran corporate affairs for a phone company. Guatemala’s judiciary is treating this as a serious legal question. American policymakers should be treating it as a five-alarm fire.
The target is Millicom International Cellular, parent of Tigo Guatemala, traded right here on Nasdaq under the ticker TIGO and held in the portfolios of American mutual funds and pension systems. Millicom represents one of the most significant foreign investments in Guatemala. It’s a Securities and Exchange Commission filer, one of the largest single foreign investments in the Guatemalan economy, and a company that has spent years cleaning up a mess it didn’t create. When Guatemalan courts start improvising nine-figure judgments against it, American shareholders eat the loss for a scandal that was already closed.
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Here’s the history worth knowing. Between 2012 and 2018, a Guatemalan minority shareholder who exercised outsize control over the local operator ran a bribery scheme through the company’s ranks — cash flown by helicopter to a corporate helipad, backdated contracts, shell companies laundering money for Guatemalan officials, including roughly $1 million that started as drug-trafficking proceeds before a banker cleaned it and routed it toward bribes to secure spectrum licenses and favorable legislation. That is ugly by any measure. It is also, as of November 2025, resolved. Tigo Guatemala’s operating company signed a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, paid more than $118 million, and put a detailed statement of facts on the public record. That is what responsible companies do when they find rot in their own history: they own it, they pay for it, and they move on. Case closed.
Except the men who built that rot won’t let it stay closed. Former executives tied to that same minority-shareholder apparatus — including Manuel Sisniega — are now suing Millicom’s Guatemalan units in labor court for more than $100 million, with a third pending claim seeking $430 million on the strength of that fictional athlete-tier salary. Millicom’s own accounting, conceding every disputed point, puts realistic exposure around $5 million. It strains credulity to see these staggering amounts as simply executives seeking a fair severance. They are the operators of a bribery scheme that a U.S. federal filing already put on the record, now trying to extract a second fortune from the company whose shareholders already paid once to clean up their mess.
Guatemala’s courts are helping them do it. Two of these judgments are already in enforcement, meaning Millicom could be forced to pay, or placed under judicial intervention, before the Constitutional Court rules on whether the underlying numbers hold up. In one case, a chamber granted the company protective relief and then withdrew it with little explanation. Guatemalan law reportedly offers no way to recover the money once it’s paid.
That should matter in Washington well beyond the shareholder letters. Guatemala sits at the center of every migration and counter-narcotics conversation the United States has with Central America — Safe Mobility Offices, Customs and Border Protection coordination, the fentanyl and smuggling corridors running straight through the country. That partnership assumes Guatemalan institutions function well enough to be worth relying on. A judiciary willing to fast-track a nine-figure payout to men tied to a bribery scheme, ahead of any ruling on whether the claim is real, undercuts that assumption.
President Bernardo Arevalo’s government came in promising better. This spring, after years of resistance, Arevalo forced out Attorney General Maria Consuelo Porras and installed Gabriel Estuardo Garcia Luna. The State Department and anti-corruption groups treated it as a milestone. But perhaps the celebration of rule of law being restored was a bit premature. An attorney general’s office that stays quiet while bribery-scheme veterans allegedly extort a $100 million windfall through the labor courts isn’t demonstrating reform. It’s demonstrating that Guatemala swapped a name at the top of the org chart while the machinery underneath kept running.
There’s a treaty dimension too. Guatemala is a Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement signatory, which exists precisely to give American investors confidence that Central American courts won’t be turned into collection agencies for whoever has the right connections. If this ends up in investor-state arbitration, it will be Guatemala’s trade relationship with the U.S. absorbing the damage.
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Other foreign investors are taking notice. Media recently reported that Grupo Energia Bogota has thrown the brakes on a $513 million investment in Guatemala’s energy grid, which brings even further scrutiny to the country’s judicial insecurity.
Washington doesn’t need to take a side on Guatemalan labor law to see what’s happening here. It needs to ask why a court system is racing to enforce judgments built on numbers nobody credible believes, in favor of the very people the U.S. government already tied to bribery and money laundering, against a company that did the responsible thing and paid to close the book. Guatemala wants to be treated as a serious partner on migration and security. It should start by making sure its courts aren’t underwriting a second payday for the last scandal Washington helped uncover.
Duggan Flanakin is a Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow policy analyst.
