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.