The Ecuadorian Prosecutor’s Office will file charges for alleged bribery against the Former President Lenin Moreno and dozens of people involved in the case called Sinohydro, the Chinese state company that allegedly paid bribes for the construction of Coca Codo Sinclair, the largest hydroelectric plant in the country.
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In a video broadcast on social networks, the attorney general, Diana Salazar, anticipated that among the defendants is the former president (2017-2021) along with his wife and one of their daughters, as well as two brothers and two sisters-in-law of the former president.
The Prosecutor’s Office will also file charges against other officials as well as two managers of Coca Codo Sinclair and the former Chinese ambassador to Ecuador Cai Runguo, who at the time was Sinohydro’s legal representative.
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According to the attorney general, who is waiting for the National Court of Justice to set the date for the hearing to formulate charges, the bribes in this case amount to 76 million dollars, which would correspond to approximately 4% of the contracted value of the work”.
Although the contract was signed for 1,979 million dollars, in practice its cost exceeded 2,245 million dollars.
“Those tens of millions of dollars in bribes (bribes) would have been delivered by Sinohydro and channeled through third parties using a false image of consulting and representation services and paid through gifts, checks and transfers,” Salazar explained.
International cooperation
He also assured that the investigation carried out for more than two years managed to gather sufficient evidence of “a structure of corruption around the Coca Codo Sincalir hydroelectric project, with an interstate and transnational scope and that it would have carried out its illegal actions between 2009 and 2018.” .
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The attorney general indicated that during the investigation phase up to a dozen international cooperation requests have been made with the authorities of countries such as Panama, Belize, Switzerland, China, the United States and Spain, “documents that have continued to reach this institution until this very week.”
“In the case of China, it has not been answered so far. International cooperation is really important for investigations like this because they help to reliably demonstrate the configuration of the crime and its scope outside the national territory,” he concluded.
Offshore and property in Spain
The Sinohydro case broke out in 2019, when the journalistic portal La Fuente published an investigation involving one of Moreno’s brothers with alleged accounts in tax havens and a luxurious property in Alicante (Spain), in an apparent triangulation of a opaque company.
In that journalistic report, a series of links and alleged irregularities were revealed that linked Moreno to the “offshore” company INA Investment, which led to an initial investigation by the Prosecutor’s Office into alleged bribes collected when he held the Vice Presidency of Ecuador, together with the now ex-president Rafael Correa (2007-2017).
However, the ex-governor has categorically denied that complaint and has suggested that it is due to a political strategy of his main detractor, Correa, who lives in Belgium and who has been convicted by the Ecuadorian Justice in another corruption case.
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With a capacity of 1,500 megawatts, the Coca Codo Sinclair Hydroelectric Power Plant is on the Coca River, between the Amazonian provinces of Napo and Sucumbíos, and its infrastructure is in question due to the appearance of thousands of cracks in its structure even before it was put into operation. in operation in 2016.
In September 2022, the state-owned Corporación Eléctrica del Ecuador (Celec), which has opened an international arbitration against Sinohydro, anticipated that “the plant will not be received definitively until all nonconformities or failures are resolved, in accordance with the requirements technical and legal established by the contract”.
EFE
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