Also taking part in the plot, according to the report, was former Colombian senator Piedad Córdoba, who maintains close ties with the Venezuelan government.
A commission of Ecuadorian assembly members delivered on Tuesday to the president of Colombia, Iván Duque, a report on the case of the businessman Alex Saab in which they denounce that the supposed figurehead of Nicolás Maduro used a front company to enter Ecuador in an operation that sought to “access the country’s reserve dollars.”
“Ecuador was the victim of an assault on the reserves because it is the only country that had dollars and that has dollars in the region”, explained Fernando Villavicencio, president of the Political Control and Supervision Commission of the Ecuadorian Assembly, when delivering the report to Duque at the Casa Nariño, headquarters of the Executive.
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As he explained, based on declassified documents, Saab, a Colombian businessman facing a trial for money laundering in the United States, took advantage of a meeting on November 28, 2011 of the then presidents of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez and of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, to do business for the benefit of the Government of the Caribbean country.
At that meeting, Saab signed as a contractor a housing agreement between the two countries but its objective was “to facilitate that a paper company created five days earlier here in Bogotá, (the) Global Construction Fund (Foglocons) of Álex Saab and ( his partner) Álvaro Pulido, will operate from Ecuador, “he added.
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“The objective of Álex Saab and Álvaro Pulido and the objective of Chavismo was to appropriate the freely available reserves of the Ecuadorian State,” the assemblyman said, who assured that “this operation allowed a drain of 2,697 million dollars from the Ecuadorian reserve it put at risk the liquidity of the entire economy “of that country.
According to the commission, During the government of Rafael Correa (2007-2017), Ecuador allegedly handed over the Saab front company and another created in 2012 in Guayaquil with the same name by Pulidor, “160 million dollars that days after having received in the accounts of Banco Amazonas and Banco Territorial were taken out of Ecuador to companies in tax havens and to the United States.”
Political and business corruption
The former Colombian senator Piedad Córdoba, who maintains close ties with the Venezuelan government, although she has denied being a friend of Saab, as well as “more than 100 bad Venezuelan, Ecuadorian and Colombian businessmen, were also part of the plot, according to the assembly member.”
Villavicencio and the rest of the members of the Ecuadorian delegation gave Duque the report on this supposed “continental network of organized crime” and the president will put it tomorrow in the hands of the Prosecutor’s Office for study.
Duque stressed that it is “a transnational operation of money laundering, money laundering and illegal financing of political activities” orchestrated by Saab, which also involves “people close to the governments of several countries, including the dictatorial regime of Venezuela. , previous governments in the case of Ecuador and also Colombian politicians and people who have been linked to state contracting. “
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Saab, 50, was arrested in 2020 in Cape Verde by an international arrest warrant requested by the US justice and extradited on October 16 to the United States.
The hearing to schedule the trial of Saab, considered the front man of the president of Venezuela, by the conspiracy to launder money where he is allegedly involved, was postponed to February 16 due to the explosion of covid-19 in the state of Florida. (I)
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