2023-06-09 16:02:09
US Congressmen Raúl Grijalva and Jesús ‘Chuy’ García sent a letter to US Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting that the Department of Justice investigate Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso for his “potentially corrupt dealings” in the North American country.
According to a statement from Grijalva’s office, the letter was prompted by news reports detailing “new evidence linking Lasso to shell companies and tens of millions of dollars in Florida real estate.”
This arose after the publications made by the Miami Herald and the Ecuadorian newspaper Plan V, on Friday of last week, when they revealed that two companies had signed a contract for 250,000 dollars in the US to manage the image of Lasso in the North American country and in the United Kingdom, when the president was facing a political trial in the National Assembly.
The document was signed between the companies Global Research and Asset Management LLC (GRAM), a Florida-based wealth management company led by Miguel Macías, a former director of Banco Guayaquil —an entity of which Lasso was executive president—, and public relations firm Perceptual Advisors LLC.
In official records, GRAM, which parliamentarians say is “a shell company long suspected of being related to Lasso,” was acting as a representative of the Ecuadorian Presidency’s General Secretariat for Communication.
In the letter to Attorney General Garland, the congressmen urgently request “a thorough investigation of President Lasso’s apparent holdings in the US and potentially corrupt financial dealings” in the country.
Previous letter to Biden
Last April, Grijalva and other legislators sent a first letter to US President Joe Biden, urging that the Department of Justice investigate Lasso for allegedly using US jurisdictions “to hide assets and evade taxes.”
This, as a result of another journalistic investigation that was published since last January in the South American country by the local digital media La Posta, which revealed the existence of an alleged network of corruption in public companies in Ecuador, which would be led by the brother-in-law of Lasso, Danilo Carrera, and his trusted operator, Rubén Cherres (murdered on March 31).
Besides, according to the revelations, the Ecuadorian government, through Cherres, would have an alleged connection with drug trafficking, specifically with the Albanian mafia.
In the letter sent to Biden, the legislators point out that the evidence points to Carrera and Lasso himself “have been resorting to US jurisdictions to hide assets and evade taxes, in violation of Ecuadorian law.”
In that same letter, the signatories had already made reference to the fact that US investigators discovered that Lasso used two front men associated with Banco Guayaquil, one is Macías and the other is Euvenia Touriz, to open offshore companies in tax havens, including in jurisdictions of the North American country.
“These companies acquired millions of dollars in real estate in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, Florida, a geographic area considered sensitive for money laundering in real estate by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network ( FinCEN) from the Treasury Department,” the letter says.
For all these reasons, in addition to requesting the investigation, they asked the current US administration to consider “reviewing its bilateral relations with the government of President Lasso.”
RT
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