The Ecuadorian Attorney General’s Office requested on Friday the house arrest of former President Lenín Moreno, whom he accused, together with his family, of receiving more than half a million dollars in alleged bribes during the construction of the largest hydroelectric plant in the country when he was vice president of the government of Rafael Correa.
At the hearing to formulate charges, the attorney general, Diana Salazar, also required preventive detention of 36 other defendants, including the wife, daughter, two brothers and two brothers-in-law of the 69-year-old former president. According to the fiscal thesis, they also benefited from that illicit money derived from the construction of the Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric plant, located in the Amazon.
Salazar pointed out that around 76 million dollars were allocated to bribes directed at the defendants through the national and international financial system between 2009 and 2018, in what he described as the largest corruption case prosecuted in this country.
The former president has lived in Paraguay since January of last year and works as commissioner of the program of the Organization of American States for the claim of people with disabilities. Moreno has used a wheelchair for more than 20 years after being shot during an assault that left him without mobility in his legs.
The former president has said that he had no responsibility for the contracting of this work and that it was in charge of the energy authorities at the time when he was vice president of the country between 2007 and 2013, during the successive governments of President Rafael Correa (2007-2017). He claimed that at that stage he is in charge of programs related to disability.
The case began in October 2022 when a group of legislators from the Oversight Commission of the Ecuadorian Assembly presented a report on the case to the Prosecutor’s Office, the Comptroller’s Office, and other control entities requesting that criminal proceedings be initiated against those responsible for the negotiation, adjudication and construction of the hydroelectric plant.
The Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric plant began operations in 2016 six years after its construction began. It has a capacity of 1,500 megawatts and is located between the Amazonian provinces of Napo and Sucumbíos.
During its execution, it has presented a series of inconveniences that even led the Electric Corporation of Ecuador in 2021 to file an international arbitration claim for which the Chinese construction company Sinohydro assumed at its cost the repair of at least 7,000 cracks in its distributors. The claim is awaiting resolution.
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