The Troubling Financial Activities of an Ecuadorian Presidential Candidate
MARCH 27, 2017
by MARK WEISBROT
As Ecuador heads toward the second round of its presidential election on April 2, a scandal has broken out over the opposition candidate Guillermo Lasso’s financial dealings. The accusations are serious and largely based on public records, with most of it verifiable on websites such as the Panamanian Public Registry and Superintendency of Banks and the Ecuadorean Superintendency of Companies. The newspaper that broke the story was Página/12 of Argentina, with two articles there in the last week by journalist Cynthia Garcia, as well as on her website.
Yet, as of this writing, the major international media covering the election, as well as the big privately owned Ecuadorian media, have pretended for a week that the story does not exist. This is despite the fact that President Correa has publicly denounced Lasso for his dealings and called on him to resign from his campaign. And Lasso publicly responded without denying the accusations. It is difficult to explain this gap in reporting on the basis of what most people would consider journalistic norms.
It is as if the US and international media had failed to report on the controversy over Donald Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns during the 2016 US presidential election.
Lasso has been routinely described as a “former banker” who allegedly retired from banking activities five years ago. However, he remains a major shareholder in Ecuador’s largest bank, the Bank of Guayaquil, (through a trust named with his initials, GLM). And evidence from minutes of board meetings of Banco Guayaquil’s parent company indicate that he is still a key decision maker at the bank, where he has been Executive President for more than 20 years. This in itself would be big news in Ecuador, where banking interests ran the country in the years prior to the election of Rafael Correa in 2007, and are not held in high regard since they caused a severe financial and economic crisis in the 1990s. This crisis impoverished many Ecuadorians and sent large numbers of people out of the country to seek employment.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/27/the-troubling-financial-activities-of-an-ecuadorian-presidential-candidate/