Former President Rafael Correa referred to the revelations of Xavier Muñoz and Álex Palacios, who gave early testimony in the Judicial Independence case.
The former spokesperson of the Judiciary, Xavier Muñoz, when he was arrested and transferred to prison 4 in Quito, on December 29, 2023.
One day after the controversial early testimony of Xavier Muñoz, as part of the Judicial Independence case, former president Rafael Correa responded to the accusations against him.
The former member of the Judicial Council (CJ), Muñoz, is prosecuted in this case for alleged obstruction of justice, and asked to give his testimony before an eventual trial.
At the hearing, Muñoz assured that he had supposedly met with Correa, at a meeting where the leader of the Citizen Revolution (RC) offered him support from the Correa bench in a possible impeachment trial in the Assembly.
But this support would also have had its conditions, according to Muñoz, and would consist of supporting Wilman Terán, who had already become president of the Judiciary.
This April 11, Correa acknowledged that he met with Muñoz in Brazil in 2023. The meeting, indicated the Correísta leader, was in a “luxurious five-star hotel, everything paid for.”
He had arrived at this place at the invitation of a Brazilian socialist party, said the former president convicted in the Bribery case.
“I met with him, and first he went to complain to me. He showed his egocentrism by saying that he had been a student leader and that now (Guillermo) Lasso was persecuting him,” said Correa, in an interview with radio Armónica, this Thursday.
Then, Correa stated, Muñoz asked him for his support: “He came to propose things to me, I never proposed anything to him. (…) He gave us a bad impression.”
Furthermore, the former president assured that the meeting with Muñoz occurred because the former spokesperson was looking for him through a third person, who was also at the meeting in Brazil and “he can give his testimony when necessary.”
Correa and the ‘relationship’ with Wilman Terán
During his interview this Thursday, Correa denied that he had a close relationship, through telephone calls, with the former president of the Judiciary, Wilman Terán.
But, as Álex Palacios, a man of Terán’s ‘trust’, declared on Wednesday, there were alleged calls between Terán, Muñoz and Correa in May 2023.
“We never had a relationship with Terán, he was one of the judges who convicted us in the second instance in the Bribery case,” the former president recalled.
In his advance statement, Palacios assured that the conversations between Terán and Correa were supposedly to exert pressure and annul the sentence for embezzlement that weighs on the leader of the Citizen Revolution.
Asked about this, Correa pointed out: “Finally, if I am seeking to resolve the legal problem, what crime am I committing? “
For the so-called Judicial Independence case, Terán, Muñoz, and five former officials of the Judiciary were initially prosecuted. Then, on April 4, 2024, six other former judicial servants were linked. In total, the process has 13 suspects
