Presidents Piñera and Lasso, and Brazilian super minister Guedes operated at sea

According to the survey, the President of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, used an offshore account in the British Virgin Islands to complete the sale of Minera Dominga to one of his childhood friends, the businessman Alberto Délano.

The operation, which took place nine months after Piñera took office as president, included an act signed in Chile for $ 14 million and another in the Virgin Islands for $ 138 million.

“The amount was to be paid in three installments, with one exception: the last payment depended on the failure to establish an environmental protection zone on the mining area, as claimed by environmental groups. The decision on the viability of Minera Dominga was left in the hands of the Piñera government, which did not promote environmental protection, so the third tranche was ultimately paid. Despite these shadows, the manager of the family businesses Piñera assured, when questioned, that the president has not managed his business for 12 years, that he has not been informed of the process of selling Dominga and that the judicial investigation on the operation ended in a dismissal ”. , published the Spanish newspaper El País, which is part of the IJC.

Regarding Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso, a former banker, Pandora Papers documents showed that he had come to operate with 14 offshore companies, the majority in Panama, managed by several of them by the German study, Cordero, Galindo & Lee (Alcogal) who, among other recognized clients, relied on Venezuelans to embezzle money from PDVSA in Andorra for $ 2,000 million.

Lasso, however, closed offshore companies after Correísmo promoted a law prohibiting presidential candidates in Ecuador from having accounts in tax havens.

The current Ecuadorian president has justified the existence of these activities in which bankers are not allowed to invest in his country.

At Brazil, Pandora Papers targets the star super minister of the government of Jair Bolsonaro, the liberal Paulo Guedes, and also the president of the Central Bank, Roberto Campos Neto. “Neither of them made their offshore operations known to the public before taking up positions in which they have had to make decisions that affect this type of investment. This possible conflict of interest particularly affects the Minister of the Economy, who is leading a tax reform project. which, in its current version, reduces the pressure on individual money in tax havens, ”El País reported.

Guedes, his wife and daughter are British Virgin Islands shareholders of the British Virgin Islands registered group Dreadnoughts International. It’s a business called in financial jargon a storage company: businesses that open in tax havens but can sit idle for years, waiting for someone to give them a destination.

For his part, Campos Neto owns four companies, two of which are registered in Panama in partnership with his wife, whose objective was to invest in the financial assets of Santander Private Bank, of which he was a member of the executive board before assuming them. the Presidency. . of the Central Bank of Brazil.

Like Guedes, the president of the Central Bank claims to have declared all his money abroad to the Ethics Commission of the Presidency of the Republic, as well as to the Brazilian tax authorities and to the Central Bank itself.

The results of Pandora Papers are particularly relevant in Latin America, where each year some 40,000 million dollars are diverted from the Treasury to tax havens.