Ecuador court suspends former President’s bank account to investigate | Corruption Issues
A court order has suspended former bank accounts of former President Rafael Correa and 19 others as part of a corruption investigation.
The Attorney General’s Office in Ecuador says that through a local court it has suspended bank accounts of many business leaders and government officials, including former President Rafael Correa and his members, who were convicted last year of financial irregularities.
Correa and 19 others, including his former deputy who is in jail on charges of corruption, are accused of accepting $ 7.5m in bribes in exchange for government support for his party’s campaign between 2012 and 2016.
The former president, who held office from 2007 to 2017, was sentenced to eight years in prison by an Ecuadorian judge in 2020 but has lived in Belgium since stepping down four years ago, evading justice in his home country.
In addition to the time of detention, the defendants were ordered to pay $ 14.7m to the state, with different amounts depending on each person’s sentence.
So far, only three out of 20 have been convicted in the case, both businessmen and debtors, according to the Attorney General’s office announced Friday.
In a statement, the office said that after the account was seized, it would “ask the same court to seize the property registered in the name of the offenders”.
Correa, 58, also has a warrant for his arrest for defrauding an politician and has been banned from politics for 25 years.
His lawyers were not immediately available for comment.
The former president has denied the allegations, saying it was the politics of former President Lenin Moreno, whom Correa had previously supported when Moreno was elected in 2017.
In August 2020 the Office of the Attorney General established a Recovery Asset Unit, with the aim of facilitating justice in criminal cases involving government officials.
