Four Ecuadorian legislators from the Supervisory Commission will travel to Colombia on Monday to deliver the report on the investigation carried out.
Next Tuesday, January 11, a group of legislators from the National Assembly’s Oversight Commission, led by Assemblyman Fernando Villavicencio, will deliver to the President of Colombia, Iván Duque, the report on the investigation of the Alex Saab case and the system Sucre.
The meeting at the Palacio de Nariño is scheduled for 10:00. The delegation of assembly members is made up of Fernando Villavicencio (CN-PSE), Ana Belén Cordero (CREO), Bruno Segovia (ex-PK) and Pedro Velasco (BAN). The same information will also be delivered to the Colombian Senate and the Attorney General’s Office of that country, on January 12.
Following the extradition of Alex Saab from Cape Verde to the United States, on October 16, 2021, the Vice President of the Audit Commission, Ana Belén Cordero, motioned to open an investigation into the Foglocons (Global Construction Fund) case, a company of Alex Saab and Álvaro Pulido.
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After a month of investigations, a report was obtained that included 23 appearances and information requested from 13 institutions in Ecuador, with approximately 10,000 certified sheets of documentary evidence. This report was approved by the Audit Commission on December 13, 2021.
The approved file contains relevant information not only for Ecuador, but for Colombia, Venezuela, Panama and the US For this reason, the Oversight Commission undertook the task of forwarding it to the prosecution offices and presidencies of those countries.
According to the president of the Commission, Fernando Villavicencio, the report will allow the Colombian authorities to complete investigations into the businesses of Alex Saab, his partner Álvaro Pulido and his company Fonglocons.
The report
The report, which will be delivered to the President of Colombia, Iván Duque; the president of the Senate, Diego Gómez; and the attorney general, Francisco Barbosa, managed to unravel the reasons why Alex Saab Morán appeared as a signatory on behalf of Colombia of the screen cooperation agreement between Colombia and Venezuela, on November 28, 2011, at the Miraflores Palace, for the construction of prefabricated houses of the Great Housing Mission.
No minister or official signed for Colombia, but the businessman Alex Saab; Former President Juan Manuel Santos was an accessory witness at that meeting in Miraflores. This agreement was signed within the framework of the Sucre system, of which Colombia was not a party, only to facilitate the business of Saab, Álvaro Pulido and his company Fonglocons, the legislative document maintains.
If the alleged Sucre agreement was with Colombia, the prefabricated houses had to be exported from Colombia, but the fictitious agreement between Hugo Chávez and Juan Manuel Santos ended up involving Ecuador, where Saab and Pulido created a twin of Fondo Global in Guayaquil, in September. of 2012, according to the memorandum of the case that will be exposed to President Duque.
For this reason, the contract for the export of prefabricated houses was between Foglocons-Ecuador and ELM Import, both Alex Saab companies, since Ecuador was the only country that had dollars available. This binational agreement between Colombia and Venezuela would not have been possible without the intervention of former Colombian senator Piedad Córdoba.
The investigation carried out by the Audit Commission confirmed the relationship between Alex Saab Morán and Piedad Córdova, a closeness that the former senator has constantly denied. The main evidence received by the National Assembly Commission was the list of passengers on a private flight from Bogotá that landed at the Quito airport on July 8, 2013. Alex Saab traveled on the Bombardier 45 aircraft, with US registration N72LJ. , Piedad Córdoba and her son Camilo Castro. This trip coincides with the opening of the previous investigation into the Foglocons case, for money laundering in Ecuador.
The aforementioned ship was acquired by Álvaro Pulido in 2012, and by October of that same year it was registered in the name of the US company Aircraft Guaranty Corporatio, investigated by the US justice for moving cocaine to various countries. This same ship was captured in the state of Florida, this time with a new Venezuelan registration, in August 2020, with a shipment of weapons that would have been destined for Cape Verde to fulfill the mission of freeing Alex Saab, who was detained.
Criminal network
The report of the National Assembly’s Oversight Commission on the Alex Saab case concludes that a transnational criminal network would have used the Sucre system to obtain dollars from Ecuador’s international reserve and finance the fictitious export operations of questioned companies from Ecuador to Venezuela. Between 2010 and 2019, approximately $ 2.6 billion of the international reserve was used to advance payments to exporting companies, which would constitute the crime of embezzlement.
The Sucre system, the file indicates, was not a regional payment system, because it involved only two countries; It was a binational system to export exclusively from Ecuador to Venezuela (99% of the operations). In addition, according to information from the Central Bank of Ecuador, the null import operations from Ecuador to Venezuela were identified, so compensation was not possible.
Additionally, the Audit Commission identified the capital flight mechanism, which would have been laundered by the Global Construction Fund (Foglocons), a company owned by Alex Saab and Álvaro Pulido, through Sucre. The route was twofold. First, money from the advance reserve that reached Ecuador’s authorized private banks almost immediately went from Global Fund accounts to accounts or companies in tax havens.
The second route was disbursements to paper companies that provided fictitious services to Foglocons, which then deposited the money in accounts outside of Ecuador. The Control Commission managed to identify the route of the money of several of the 185 operations between Foglocons Ecuador and ELM Import de Venezuela, both Alex Saab companies, through Sucre.
The report approved by the Audit Commission concluded that the money from Foglocons, which would have been laundered from the Sucre system, went to the Correa-Glas binomial campaign in 2013, through contributions made by Inconeg , a Micaela Lehrer company. The contribution was $ 70,000. (I)
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