In Ecuador, the list of those bribed by Odebrecht is reserved

Obtaining the names of the Ecuadorian officials supposedly bribed by the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht, will apparently, take its time.

“The network that has been identified in Brazil, which operates internationally, did not do it through natural persons, but through legal screens, companies domiciled abroad, with secret accounts and that will have to be investigated by tracking the money path,” Leonardo Orlando, director of the IRS, said yesterday.

In an interview on a TV channel seized, the official said that his investigation managed to identify that Odebrecht was a “customer within this network of consumers of ghost companies.” It would have moved; he said, thousands of dollars. And it did, besides, without paying taxes.

The IRS, Orlando said, will forward that information to the prosecutor’s office this week.

The phantom companies’ thesis is also part of the president’s speech. Yesterday, at two inauguration events in Quito and Cayambe, he explained why, according to him, it was not possible to discover in time the cases of corruption detected in Petroecuador and the Odebrecht kickbacks network.