The political trial takes place during the last months of Piñera’s mandate, who will leave office in March.
The impeachment trial that could end in the dismissal of the president of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, faces his last day in the Senate on Tuesday with an unprecedented vote that could last until early Wednesday morning.
At 09:00 (local time), the Upper House began to analyze the accusation against the president, initiated by alleged irregularities in the sale in the British Virgin Islands of a controversial mining project at the beginning of his first term, a scandal revealed in the investigation Pandora papers.
During the morning, a shortlist of deputies representing the Lower House will present their arguments, a body that last week historically approved with fair votes (78 out of 155) that the impeachment continue, and later Piñera’s lawyer will intervene, Jorge Galvez.
In the afternoon the final vote will begin, in which each of the 47 senators will have 15 minutes to argue, so it is expected that the day can be extended until early Wednesday morning.
In the previous session, which took place in the Lower House, the parliamentarians were active for around 22 hours and without great pauses, in part due to the filibustering promoted by an opposition deputy who spoke for 15 hours in a row to defend the “impeachment.”
It is about the impeachment against a president who has advanced the most in the country’s history, although experts estimate that it will be difficult for him to bypass the Senate, where he needs a two-thirds quorum to prosper and the opposition only has 24 votes.
The origin of the accusation, promoted by the opposition, lies in the alleged irregularities in the sale of Minera Dominga -of which the Piñera family was the main shareholder-, in the British Virgin Islands, just nine months after the president assumed the position in his first term (2010-2014).
As revealed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the project was sold to the businessman and family friend Carlos Alberto Délano for 152 million dollars, 138 of which were made in the tax haven.
The president, one of Chile’s greatest fortunes, has maintained in public appearances that he had dissociated himself from his businesses through blind trusts in 2009 and that what was revealed in Pandora’s papers was already investigated and dismissed in 2017.
National Assembly must be defined by one of the three reports on the Pandora Papers case
Pandora Papers: Offshore companies of the Montesinos network continue to operate
A third report on Pandora Papers indicates that Guillermo Lasso is disconnected from ‘offshore’ in tax havens
The political trial takes place during the last months of Piñera’s mandate, who will leave office in March, and just a few days before the presidential elections on November 21, the most momentous and uncertain elections in the recent history of the country.
This is the second attempt to remove him, after the November 2019 attempt for alleged human rights violations amid massive protests against inequality, the most serious since the end of the dictatorship. (I)
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
