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Representatives of thirteen closed universities file a complaint against former President Rafael Correa and three former officials of his government
Posted On 24 Sep 2021
The legal representatives of thirteen universities that were extinguished during the government of Rafael Correa presented, on Wednesday morning, a criminal complaint for the Prosecutor’s Office to investigate former President Correa and three of his then officials for the confiscation of movable and immovable property, cash funds in the accounts, liabilities and accounts receivable that were withheld from these institutions “legally and unconstitutionally.”
Representatives of thirteen closed universities file a complaint against former President Rafael Correa and three former officials of his government
The complaint requests that the investigation be extended to Alexis Mera, former legal secretary of the Presidency; to Guillaume Long, former president of the Board of Evaluation, Accreditation and Quality Assurance in Higher Education (Ceaaces); and René Ramírez, former president of the Higher Education Council.
Organized crime would be the crime that the complainants tentatively believe should be investigated in this case. That crime would have occurred, they said, to “assault assets that are eminently private and that they invented the way to kidnap and take them.”
The president of the Pre-Association of Closed Universities, Armando Estrada, explained that during the last nine years it has been impossible to present a legal action because the institutional power has been used to silence those who were harmed by more than $ 687 million.
“There are more than 100 properties, including buildings, land, training centers that were confiscated, many infrastructures have been auctioned. It is necessary for Ecuador to know and know in depth what they did with the material resources because the damage is millionaire, “said Estrada.
In a statement, former rector Luis Coloma, part of the pre-association, pointed out that along with the confiscation is an armed structure to ask various rectors and administrators of the universities for money in exchange for avoiding their closure and subsequent extinction. “We ask that the Prosecutor’s Office request the Comptroller’s Office to issue a copy of the reports of the special examinations carried out to the temporary administrations of the extinct universities.”
The complainants asked the Prosecutor’s Office to form a special commission made up of experts in higher education to demand the reports and testimonies of the on-site evaluators and of the assets, cash funds in the accounts, the liabilities and accounts receivable that were confiscated from universities suspended.
One of the objectives of the group is to reopen the universities that, according to them, were “unjustly closed”, by not respecting due process and being part of the fact that it was political.
Germán Espinosa, representative of the Universidad Tecnológica América, explained that all the universities that were closed on April 11, 2012 file the complaint .
“It was an assault with the Police, with the Army on the pretext that the evaluation was not passed, but all the universities passed the evaluation and we have the documents. (…) What we are asking for is justice. We have fought for more than ten years since they attacked us, since they closed us down, it has been an incessant fight. The doors were closed to us in all instances of the government of President Rafael Correa, ”said Espinosa.
