The legal architecture of Panamanian banking was not born of a single act but of a chain of state decisions traceable across the country's legal record. The documented starting point is Cabinet Decree No. 238 of 2 July 1970, published in Official Gazette No. 16640. That decree established the National Banking Commission — the first specialised body charged with supervising banking business in the Republic — and in doing so formally repealed Law 101 of 1941, which had governed banks and credit institutions in rudimentary fashion. For nearly three decades, Cabinet Decree 238 was the axis of the system, amended on various occasions by subsequent legislation.

The real turning point came on 26 February 1998, when Decree-Law No. 9 was issued — published in Official Gazette No. 23499 on 12 March of that year and entering into force three months after promulgation. This decree expressly repealed Cabinet Decree 238, dissolving the National Banking Commission and replacing it with the Superintendency of Banks of Panama. The change was more than nominal: it moved from a collegiate commission model to a technical regulator with a specific mandate over banking licences, reporting requirements, and the liquidation of banks. A few months later, Law 97 of 21 December 1998 — which created the Ministry of Economy and Finance — added to and reformed provisions of Decree-Law 9, a sign that the institutional scaffolding was being built in parallel.

The second major overhaul came a decade later. On 22 February 2008, Decree-Law No. 2 was issued, entering into force six months after promulgation (Official Gazette No. 25985). This decree acted on Decree-Law 9 in three ways simultaneously: it reformed it, added new provisions to it, and repealed specific articles that had become obsolete. The scope was substantial — it overhauled the objectives, functions, and bodies of the Superintendency; redefined the composition and powers of its Board of Directors; updated the procedure for granting and cancelling licences; strengthened anti-money-laundering rules; and introduced consumer-protection regulations for banking clients. Two months later, Executive Decree No. 52 of 30 April 2008 adopted a Consolidated Text of Decree-Law 9 incorporating all of Decree-Law 2's modifications, bringing every accumulated reform together into a single authoritative document.

The legal record also captures the regulatory dimension that the Superintendency built under the authority granted by Decree-Law 9. Agreement No. 008-2005 elaborated the article on banking reserves, and Agreement No. 01-2006 regulated provisions on asset liquidation — the latter subsequently modified by the Superintendency's own Agreements No. 04-2006 and No. 007-2008. This fabric of secondary instruments illustrates how a regulator exercises its delegated rule-making power: the parent statute sets the framework and the Superintendency fills it with operational content through its own agreements. Law 67 of 2011, which created the Superintendency of the Securities Market, also reformed Decree-Law 9, adjusting the coordination between financial oversight bodies.

The judicial chapter of this story closes the cycle. On 11 June 2014, the Plenary of the Supreme Court of Justice resolved an unconstitutionality action filed against Decree-Law 9 and the Consolidated Text of Executive Decree 52 (ruling published in Official Gazette No. 27731-A on 3 March 2015). The Plenary declared certain articles unconstitutional — among them Article 19 of Decree-Law 9, renumbered as Article 22 in the Consolidated Text — together with a phrase in Article 4 of the Consolidated Text that exempted the Superintendency from national taxes and levies. At the same time, the Court found that other challenged articles had already lost their force through abatement of subject matter — they had been repealed by Decree-Law 2 of 2008 itself. The ruling illustrates how judicial review operates as a purifying mechanism within the legal order: it does not overturn the banking regime wholesale, but excises the provisions incompatible with the Constitution while leaving the general supervisory architecture intact.

Taken together, a continuous line of more than eight decades can be traced: from Law 101 of 1941 to Cabinet Decree 238 of 1970, which repealed it and founded specialised banking supervision; from Cabinet Decree 238 to Decree-Law 9 of 1998, which subrogated it upon creating the Superintendency of Banks; and from Decree-Law 9 to Decree-Law 2 of 2008, which reformed it, added articles, and repealed obsolete provisions — with Executive Decree 52 as the consolidating text and the 2014 ruling as the constitutional filter. Each legislative act described a precise legal effect: fully repealing a statute is a different act from adding new articles to it, or from regulating its application through secondary instruments. Understanding those distinctions is understanding how Panama builds — and continuously updates — the rules of its financial system.