Sunday, July 29, 2012

MEXICO: Massive Vote Buying, a translatlantic operation



Finally Jose Luis Ponce de Aquino was taken seriously by the electoral authorities in the case of the massive purchase of votes by the PRI and the alleged illegal peñista campaign financing …  Or so it seems for now. 

The American businessman who sued in a California court the team of Enrique Peña Nieto, allegedly for breach of a payment of millions, now launches more serious charges, which are documented in PROCESO.  According to him, the web of financial maneuvers to power the PRI campaign has an international reach, as well as probable links with organized crime.

Extending from Mexico, but with ramifications in other countries, politicians and businessmen contrived to formulate complex financial transactions in order to triangulate multi-million dollar monetary resources and buy the presidency for Enrique Peña Nieto. In this complex operation there is also evidence of money laundering.

Information in the possession of PROCESO indicates that it is an international financial operation that extends into Spain, Italy, Israel and the United States where resources were triangulated eventually to be deposited in Monex Bank for use by the PRI in the presidential campaign of Peña Nieto.

Revealed in this network are characters whose names are linked to the PRI's presidential candidate and the companies of GAP, HIGO, Jiramos, and GM Global as well as of the banks Mifel and Monex.

The scheme is similar to the money laundering operations of organized crime, says Deputy PT Jaime Cardenas, head of the legal team of the Progressive Movement coalition and who as counselor to the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) participated in the investigation of the case Amigos del Fox, which triangulated million dollars from abroad to the campaign of the PAN presidential candidate in 2000.

The pending investigation

The IFE Control Unit and has a line of research that points to the location of money presumably transferred from the foreign sources. This is considered in its report on the progress of the investigation arising from complaints made separately by the PRD and the PAN against the PRI for alleged vote buying through Monex Rewards cards, also used to pay delegates and representatives of ballot box locations.

Among the research included in the record Q-UFRPP 58/12 of the Unit now in the charge of Alfredo Cristalinas Kaulitz, as regards the fourth point - establishment of the use and linkage of Monex cards with the electoral process - it is expected that the investigation will uncover from which countries arrangements were made and via what businesses in relationship to which political parties were resources allocated for the funding and use of such cards.
In the path of inquiry, made public at a meeting on Thursday 26 - first is the identification of the types of funding and the use of the cards. Second, the determination of the expenditures made in each of the lots of cards and this is where would become evident the date of the transactions, their amount, the city and country of origin of the funds.
Also to be investigated is the relationship of individual “legal representatives, shareholders, agents, employees of corporations, among others", with political parties.

This is where the Control Unit strand seeks to unravel the complex financial strategy of millions of dollars which funded the campaign of Enrique Peña Nieto, who on June 14 revealed the connection to Mexican-American businessman Jose Luis Ponce de Aquino, owner of the Border Television Network television company LLP.
In a complaint filed in the U.S., Ponce de Aquino stated in October last year, that Enrique Peña Nieto operators offered him a contract for 56 million dollars to promote the PRI presidential candidate in the US in coordination with the campaign in Mexico.

The businessman stated that this agreement was actualized by this amount of money deposited by the representatives of the PRI's presidential candidate in Banco Monex and Banco Mifel in a single day.

Not only that but Ponce de Aquino said he witnessed the alleged transfer of bank accounts with money of unknown origin, from banks based in Italy, Israel "and another Portuguese or Brazilian bank" to an account at Monex Bank branch in Mexico City on behalf the company Jiramos, owned by Alejandro Carrillo Garza Sada, who had contacted him to do the advertising campaign for the PRI in the United States.
Ancestral Indigenous Trade Corridors of Anahuac
In the suit filed in Central District Court of California for fraud, after allegedly Peña Nieto representatives failed to make good on the payment of the $56 million in deposits made at Mifel and Monex, the entrepreneur states something more serious: suspicion that there might be money from organized crime included those transactions.

The case of Control Unit of the IFE points out: "That  C. Jose Luis Ponce de Aquino claims to have received death threats from C. José Alfredo Carrillo, Alfredo Carrillo Chontkowsky and Hugo Vigo, who warned him that the $56 million was in exchange for an image campaign in the U.S. for the PRI candidate which ‘came from companies related to the narco industry’, and that businessman Alejandro Carrillo Garza Sada told him, ‘You better not do anything or I am even going to prohibit your entry to Mexico and I will take your business’, the latter through its representative, the C. Francisco Torres."
When reporting this story publicly, Ponce de Aquino empowered the Movimiento Progresista and the PAN to intercede with separate complaints with the IFE against the PRI for alleged use of resources "of unknown origin" and that the financial authorities began to search the home country and the path of those 56 million dollars that the businessman says were deposited at Monex and Mifel and served for the campaign Peña Nieto.
Eleazar Camerino Marquez, representive of the PRD to the IFE, argues that the Attorney General's Office and the National Banking and Securities Commission and the Control Unit of the Institute must have in hand presently the hard data and specifics of these transfers along with account numbers, amounts, cash flows and allocation of funds.

On June 19 the official of the PRD made a request to the Control Unit to be informed of the progress of the investigation into this case. Alfredo Cristalinas said in the report UF/DRN/7194/2012 that such information was embargoed until the investigations conclude.

"There is no way to hide the scandal of the funds triangulated via Monex. It is clear that the financial system is not unique to Mexico, we are in an age where everything is interacting; this we saw in the case of HSBC where outside bodies detected the trail of money laundering. There is also a history of previous investigations of money laundering via Monex due to connections with international illicit drug commerce involving Spain and other European countries. This trail is recorded and therefore would be a line of investigation that the authorities should investigate.", said the PRD representative.
(Excerpt from article appearing this week in the magazine PROCESO 1865, already in circulation.)
 Translation: TONATIERRA 
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