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César Montúfar: ‘There is a strategy for other cases to go unpunished’
Posted On 17 Sep 2018
Ecuadornews:
César Montúfar affirms that his denunciation of organized crime related to the Odebrecht case will reveal that in the country the Citizen Revolution built a scheme of state corruption in ten years and with Rafael Correa in the presidency of Ecuador corruption became institutionalized.
It has been nine months since the Odebrecht unlawful association sentence against Jorge Glas and others was ordered to investigate other crimes, such as organized crime, but the Office of the Prosecutor opens a preliminary investigation for that crime, which you filed in March. What happens with the investigations?
For some crimes investigations have been opened, for others not yet; and in the case of organized crime that I denounced, it was opened in April and they have been slow to call me to acknowledge signature and give version. That does not mean that we do not have concern about how these investigations are progressing, since it is important that there be greater speed. But there is not my biggest concern.
Where is it?
My concern is with what is happening in the judicial processes. There is a clear strategy so that all these processes, which emerged from the illicit association, are reversed and even remain in impunity. There was the case of a lawsuit for money laundering against two sentenced Odebrecht in which they were confirmed innocence because they could not act with the same evidence of the process by unlawful association.
And where is it going?
It will create a precedent that can be used in the investigation processes, especially for the big shots, in this case Glas, and that could result in those recommended in the ruling for conspiracy not guilty sentences but innocence. (…) The legal principle that you cannot judge anyone twice for the same facts is correct, but that is not what is happening, but is part of a strategy for Glas to be left alone with the sentence by illicit association and in the rest of cases it cannot be judged.
You have said that corruption in the country should not be understood as isolated events, but thought in an organized way.
Corruption in the Correa regime changed qualitatively. Not that before there was not, but it was individual officials. With Correa it becomes a systemic fact, in a structural way, in a form of Government. Today it is qualified as institutionalized corruption and it occurs when it is legalized.
Do you mean that from the Government legal changes were made to enable corruption? What the Correa government did was to change the Constitution, so that the autonomy of entities such as the Comptroller’s Office, the Procurator’s Office … was eliminated. They were in practice dependent on the Presidency, through the Participation Council, which he named to officials controlled from Carondelet. They changed at least five laws that made corruption feasible, among them the Public Procurement, the Procurator’s Office, the Comptroller’s Office, the Criminal Code … Those who were part of this criminal organization took over, having democratic legality through the electoral process, the dome of the State … The fraud that made the Citizen Revolution to the country is not only economic, but moral and political. (I)
