Several rulers from all over the world, including the presidents of Chile, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic, appear in the ‘Pandora Papers’, an international journalistic research published this Sunday that reveals the concealment of assets in tax havens.
Research, which is based on filtering about 11.9 million documents from 14 financial services companies around the world, was in charge of the International Consortium of Research Journalists (ICIJ) and involved some 600 dozen journalists of
Media, including The Washington Post, The Guardian and the country.
In the case of the Chilean president, Sebastián Piñera, the local media Ciper and Labot reveal the sale in the British Virgin Islands of Minera Dominga the entrepreneur Carlos Alberto Délano, “one of his children of childhood”. According to the country, the family of the president sold the company to Délano with a signed act in Chile for 14 million dollars and another in the Virgin Islands for 138 million dollars. The operation goes back to December 2010, when Piñera was born nine months in the palace of the coin. The payment of the operation had to be done in three installments, the last subjected to “that an area of environmental protection was not established on the mineral operations area, as they claimed environmental groups,” he cites the Spanish environment. The Piñera government decided not to promote the environmental protection of the area, a condition with which the last payment would have been made. “The President has never participated or had any information about the sale process of Minera Dominga,” said Presidency of Chile in a statement. The president was investigated by these facts in 2017 and “the Prosecutor’s Office recommended to complete the cause for the lack of offense, adjust to the Law and the lack of participation of President Sebastián Piñera in the aforementioned operation,” said the presidential communiqué.
The investigation also indicates the linkage of Luis Abinader, president of the Dominican Republic, with two companies in Panama, Littleot Inc. and Parento SA, both created before sweating the position, according to the news research without.
According to the Dominican environment, the actions of these societies were “the bearer”, “an instrument used to hide the beneficiaries of the companies”.
Abinader “was publicly registered as a beneficiary in 2018, three years after a law enters a law that forces companies to disclose the identity of its owners,” says the country.
“When he was investigated president, in 2020, the president declared nine offshore societies that he controlled through a trust. Abinader says he does not have any participation in the administration of it,” adds the medium.
The third president who appears in the investigation is Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso.
According to the middle the Universe, the president controlled 14 offshore companies, most of the headquarters in Panama, and closed them after the correor (2007-2017) approved a law that prohibited presidential candidates from having companies in tax havens.
Lasso, a former banker, “alleges that he led money abroad because national legislation prevents bankers from investing in him,” he cites the country.
The president expressed Sunday that “is public knowledge that my heritage, contained in the declaration of goods surrendered to the General Comptroller of the State, is the result of my work of all my life at Banco Guayaquil. All my income have been declared and
They have paid the corresponding taxes in Ecuador, having become one of the greatest personal contributors in the country. ”
He added that “all the investments made in Ecuador and abroad were always within the framework of the law.”
The investigation also includes the names of 11 former Latin American leaders: the Panamanians Juan Carlos Varela, Ricardo Martinelli and Ernesto Pérez Balladares;
The Colombians César Gaviria and Andrés Pastrana;
The Peruvian Pedro Pablo Kuczynski;
The Honduran Porfirio Lobo and the Paraguayan Horacio Cartes.
Paulo Guedes, Minister of Economy and Strong Man of the Government of the President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, also appears in the filtered documents.
According to these documents, King Abdullah II of Jordan created at least thirty offshore societies in countries or territories with fiscal facilities, through which he bought 14 luxury properties in the United States and the United Kingdom, for more than 106 million dollars.
King Abdullah II’s lawyers affirmed the BBC that all the properties were purchased with the personal fortune of it.
Laws argued that among high-profile personalities is common to buy properties through offshore companies for privacy and safety reasons.
The Royal House Jordana admitted this Monday that “it is not a secret” that King Abdalá II, one of the main ones indicated by the investigation entitled Pandora’s roles, has different properties, but tiled the deformed and exaggerated information.
The Czech Prime Minister, Andrej Babis, on the other hand, placed $ 22 million in ghost companies that were used to finance the purchase of Château Bigaud, a large property located in Mougins, in southern France. “I have never done anything illegal or wrong,” Reacted Babis in his Twitter account, and regretted that “that does not prevent them from trying to denigrate and influence the Czech parliamentary elections”, scheduled for next Friday and Saturday. In total, ICIJ established links between offshore assets and 336 senior executives and politicians, who created close to 1,000 companies, more than two-thirds of which are found in the British Virgin Islands. In most countries, these facts are not pronitable. But in the case of leaders, ICIJ compares the anti-corruption discourse of some of them with their investments in tax havens. Established in 1997 by the US Center for Public Integrity, ICIJ became an independent entity in 2017.Su network includes 280 journalists in more than 100 countries and territories, as well as about 100 associated media. The ICIJ was announced at the beginning of April 2016 with the publication of the “Paper of Panama”, an investigation based on some 11.5 million documents from a Panamanian law firm.
