A commission of Ecuadorian assembly members delivered this Tuesday to the president of Colombia, Ivan duque, a report on the case of Alex Saab, in which they denounce that the aforementioned figurehead of Nicolas Maduro used a shell company to enter Ecuador in an operation that sought to “access the reserve dollars” of that country.
(In context: Why is Ecuador investigating links between Saab, Piedad Córdoba and Rafael Correa?)
The document was presented by members of the Ecuadorian National Assembly and the Political Control and Supervision Commission of that corporation. Those who traveled to Bogotá to meet with Duque at the Casa de Nariño include Pedro Velasco, Assemblyman for the province of Carchi and Bruno Segovia, Assemblyman for the province of Azuay.
The other member is Fernando Villavicencio, president of the Audit Commission and who led the delivery of the report. “Ecuador was the victim of an assault on the reserves because it is the only country that had dollars and that has dollars in the region,” Villavicencio explained when delivering the report at Casa Nariño.
(You may be interested: From jail, Saab says he had no business with Santos or Correa)
Villavicencio, in addition to being an assembly member, is an Ecuadorian journalist and activist who during the presidency of Rafael Correa He was under fire for his disclosures of opaque events that occurred during that government. In fact, the current president of the Oversight Commission made a request for political asylum in Peru in the past.
For his complaints against correísmo, the journalist and activist was convicted in the past for insult. However, in 2018, the National Court of Justice declared him innocent for an alleged disclosure of confidential information from Correa’s presidency.
What does the report that the assembly members presented say?
As Villavicencio explained in the report on the Saab case, based on declassified documents, the Colombian businessman – who is facing a trial for money laundering in the US – took advantage of a meeting of the then presidents of Venezuela on November 28, 2011 , Hugo Chávez and from Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, to do business for the benefit of the Venezuelan Government.
At that meeting, Saab signed as a contractor a housing agreement between the two countries but its objective was “to facilitate that a paper company created five days earlier here in Bogotá, (the) Global Construction Fund (Foglocons) of Álex Saab and ( his partner) Álvaro Pulido, will operate from Ecuador, “he added.
“The objective of Álex Saab and Álvaro Pulido and the objective of Chavismo was to appropriate the freely available reserves of the Ecuadorian State,” the assemblyman said, who assured that “this operation allowed a drain of 2,697 million dollars from the Ecuadorian reserve it put at risk the liquidity of the entire economy “of that country.
According to the commission, during the government of Rafael Correa (2007-2017), Ecuador allegedly handed over to the Saab front company and another one created in 2012 in Guayaquil with the same name by Pulido, “160 million dollars that days after having received in the accounts of Banco Amazonas and Banco Territorial were taken out of Ecuador to companies in tax havens and to the United States. “
The former Colombian senator Piedad Córdoba was also part of the plot, according to the assembly members. These indications of the Ecuadorian report caused Saab, from prison in the United States, to affirm that it did not do business with Santos or Correa.
For his part, Córdoba rejected the report and announced that he will sue Villavicencio for these accusations.
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* With information from Efe
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