Daniel Noboa’s options are limited to get rid of Vice President Verónica Abad before the campaign for the 2025 elections begins. The votes were not enough for the Government party in the Legislature to authorize a possible criminal trial against Vice President Verónica Abad , for the alleged crime of concussion; that is, for using her position to demand payment from another person in exchange for a job. In a session convened virtually by the president of the chamber on June 14, the motion to authorize the prosecution of the second president reached only 47 votes, when it required a minimum of 92 to give way to the request of the National Court of Justice.
Legislators made a second motion, this time to vote not to authorize the criminal trial against Abad. For that, only 70 votes were required and they got more than enough. She was saved by the Citizen Revolution parties of Rafael Correa, whom Abad has fiercely criticized in the past. Also the Construye bloc, which has declared itself in opposition to the Government and the Social Christian Party, which was one of its last allies until the impasse between one of the party leaders – who is also the president of Congress – and the spokesman for the Government.
With this resolution of Parliament, Abad will not be able to be linked in the judicial process called Baby, which is being investigated by the Ecuadorian Prosecutor’s Office after a complaint from a former Vice Presidency employee, Rommel P., who claims that Abad’s son and another person who posed as an advisor to the president negotiated his hiring as communications coordinator in exchange for a part of your salary. According to investigations, the crime took place in November 2023 in a hotel suite in Quito. The complainant had worked with Abad in the 2022 sectional elections and was called to collaborate ad honorem in October 2023, after the victory of the pairing. In exchange, he was offered to hire him when he assumed power. By then, the relationship between Abad and Noboa was already broken, according to what he said in an interview with EL PAÍS.
The complainant attended the scheduled meeting one night. According to his story, Sebastián Barreiro Abad and Daniel R., the advisor who accompanies the vice president in Israel, were waiting for him, although he is not part of the institution’s staff. At the meeting, the position of communication coordinator in the Vice Presidency was negotiated. The position has a salary of $3,200, but he was offered $1,200. In the end they closed the deal for 1,500 and the difference had to be delivered in cash and into the hands of the second president’s son. To guarantee monthly payments, according to the complainant, they forced him to sign a bill of exchange for $30,000. Rommel signed. But in December and January the Government did not pay the salaries of public officials on time due to lack of money and the payment of tithe was delayed for two months.
The Government described the vote of the assembly members as a “dirty political pact” when referring to its former allies in Congress. “The court’s request to lift Verónica Abad’s immunity was clear and motivated. It was just a matter of letting – as in any moderately stable democracy – the bodies of the judicial function do their work,” says the statement from the Communication Secretariat of the Presidency. The document closes with a sentence: “In this Government we are clear: transparency is our main flag. “No official is above the law.” Fortunately for the Government, the crime of concussion for which they want to accuse the vice president does not prescribe. If the Prosecutor’s Office wants to link her to the case again, it must do so after May 24, 2025, when the immunity that she enjoys as second president has been lifted. But her problem is timing. It is to resolve the matter before the start of the electoral campaign in January.
The president suffered another setback with this matter after the response of the State Attorney, who refrained from interpreting several articles of laws and the Ecuadorian Constitution that Noboa requested to be president and candidate at the same time, without needing to entrust power to the vice president. The law states that dignitaries who opt for immediate re-election to the same position must take unpaid leave from the beginning of the electoral campaign. But the president consulted the State lawyer if that rule also applied to him because it is a transitional government that will not complete the four-year term that a mandate lasts and, therefore, his participation in the presidential elections of 2025 will not be counted as a re-election, because that is what the law establishes. But the attorney, Juan Carlos Larrea, responded that the consultation requires a constitutional interpretation, and that is not his responsibility.
“The spirit of the law is clear: that there should not be a campaign and an exercise of functions at the same time,” explains Ximena Ron, a constitutional lawyer, who believes that if the attorney had ruled differently, it would have set a bad precedent and left open the possibility that any other official can influence an election through his position.
The Government has few options left to prevent Abad from assuming power when Daniel Noboa is campaigning for the presidential elections. One of those, but weaker, is a possible impeachment promoted by the ruling party. When the Prosecutor’s Office changed the type of crime to concussion, it also opened the possibility for Abad to be seated on the Legislative bench, because concussion is one of the causes stipulated in the law. But since the Government failed to obtain the 92 votes for her to be criminally investigated, it would be a useless effort by the Government to try to open a political trial against her. Another of the letters against the vice president is a complaint in the Electoral Court, in which she is accused of electoral infraction for early campaigning in the 2022 sectional elections. “This option is an infraction, where the sanction is not dismissal per se, but ranges from a financial fine to dismissal. By proportionality it would be understood that the dismissal is absolutely exaggerated,” says Ron. But the Government has shown that the unthinkable can be possible. So far, those are the two cards on the table to prevent the vice president from assuming power in less than six months.
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