31/8/2016
The criminal route of Ecuadorian gold
The criminal route of Ecuadorian gold
A network of gold traffickers that mobilized hundreds of millions of dollars from Ecuador through alleged illegal practices was helped by an influential figure: Caupolicán Ochoa, personal lawyer of President Rafael Correa By Casto Ocando I @cocando (Miami * FL) – A criminal research around a presumed network of money laundering which has mobilized hundreds of millions of dollars from Ecuador to the United States and to other destinations through gold bullion operations, points to the President Rafael Correa's personal lawyer and to other former high officials of his cabinet, according to documents and familiar sources within the official investigation. According to inquiries from Ecuador's National Police, a group of businessmen who controlled half a dozen companies mobilized more than 400 million dollars in gold buying / selling operations, without being able to justify where the mineral came from. The Ecuadorian Prosecutor's Office ordered the arrest of several businessmen involved in the police investigation, among them the brothers Alberto, Javier and Jordi March Game, partners in the companies Spartan del Ecuador and Clearprocess, two of the companies used for such operations, and the shareholder Gustavo Jurado. The businessmen have been clients of Caupolicán Ochoa, personal lawyer of President Correa.
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The criminal route of Ecuadorian gold
After a year of investigations in an operation that authorities called "Atardecer", the Ecuadorian police documented, with the help of telephone interventions, how those involved pulled the strings to access judicial courts and judges, in order to stop legal proceedings against them, mainly for money laundering and illegal possession of weapons. The intercepted telephone conversations transcripts, in the hands of VĂŠrtice, showed how the March Game brothers bribed judges and sought the help of at least one powerful minister of the Correa administration to get around their judicial problems. The evidence gathered by the police against the gold laundering network generated last week a series of raids on 21 properties related to the companies Spartan and Clearprocess. At the same time, the Prosecutor of the case, Diana Salazar, requested the arrest of seven people, including the March Game brothers, and executives of the investigated companies who were accused of alleged money laundering. Subscribe to our News Brief to receive updates on this and other papers The Gold Millions The first suspicions occurred when the companies Spartan of Ecuador and Clearprocess could not justify to the Ecuadorian Internal Revenue Service (SRI) the origin of the gold, whose negotiation generated substantial incomes from one year to another for both companies. Spartan had started activities of importing and selling chemical products to public and private entities in 1979. Between 2009 and March of this year, a period of seven years, Spartan received a total of 2.8 million dollars in contracts with the Ecuadorian state, according to the National System of Public Procurement of Ecuador. But in 2013 and 2014, Spartan received 31 transfers for nearly 24 million dollars from the firm Doremetals, a company registered in Ecuador in September 2012, but also owned at the same time by another firm registered in Florida, United States, under the name of Akar Precious Metal, according to police investigations. Remarkably, Doremetals reported to the Ecuadorian Internal Revenue Service SRI incomes for only 200 thousand dollars, but according to investigations, it received in various financial transactions a total of 184 million 600 thousand dollars, income allegedly related to the traffic of precious metals such as gold. Clearprocess, another one of the companies investigated that is owned by the March Game brothers and Gustavo Jurado, opened its doors in 2012 in the city of Machala, capital of the Province of El Oro, in southwest Ecuador, in order to "explore, exploit, melt and market all kinds of minerals".
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31/8/2016
The criminal route of Ecuadorian gold
Months later, Clearprocess expanded its operations to the port city of Guayaquil, but without much success: between 2012 and 2013 it reported zero incomes. However, the following year it suddenly experienced incomes above 189 million dollars, allegedly derived from the gold business. When the Ecuadorian authorities asked Clearprocess to justify the source of the incomes, the company's executives presented gold purchase and sale notes on behalf of 230 alleged suppliers registered as contributors of the so-called Simplified Tax Regime (RISE), a system created by the Ecuadorian Internal Revenue Service SRI in 2008, to facilitate the payment of taxes to some 40,000 artisanal Ecuadorian miners. Authorities reviewed the records and found several cases of document falsification and identity theft. According to reports from the Ecuadorian Prosecutor's Office, there are at least a dozen complaints of identity fraud against the administrators and shareholders of Clearprocess. The investigations established the modus operandi. Clearprocess operated in Machala as a buying and selling center for bullion gold. Thousands of artisan miners and intermediaries of the gold extracted in zones like Morona Santiago, Zaruma, Portovelo and Ponce Enríquez, emblematic localities of the artisanal gold mining of Ecuador’s southern region, converge in that city. Clearprocess not only bought gold from Ecuadorian miners, but also from Peruvian producers who go to Machala because of the physical proximity and the better sale conditions offered in comparison to the Peruvian markets. The authorities found unusual high incomes of nearly 190 million dollars in a single year for a single company. According to figures from the Mining Regulation and Control Agency (Arcom), that authorizes foreign sales, it was determined that the gold production between 2012 and 2014 raised to 675 million dollars, whereas in those same years, gold was exported for a total of 1.823 million dollars, according to the records of the Central Bank of Ecuador. Telephone Interceptions In order to advance in the enquiries, the police investigators got the authorization of Ecuador's Prosecutor General, Galo Chiriboga, to intervene the telephone lines of the businessmen involved in the alleged gold traffic. According to the documents held by Vértice, the calls revealed high-level connections and maneuvers to try to stop legal proceedings against them. According to the captured calls, the March Game brothers, principally Alberto and Javier, and the shareholder of Clearprocess, Gustavo Jurado, were in constant communication with Caupolicán Ochoa, president Correa’s lawyer. The notoriety of Ochoa comes from having acted as Correa’s attorney in the trial that the president introduced in 2012 against the former Assemblyman Cléver Jiménez and the journalist Fernando Villavicencio for slander, after Jiménez and Villavicencio accused Correa of committing crimes against humanity during the 2010 police uprising. Ochoa managed to have a court in Quito sentence Jiménez and Villavicencio to 18 months in prison.
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The criminal route of Ecuadorian gold
The lawyer has also represented ten public institutions and personalities, including another key figure in Correa's cabinet: the Interior Minister, José Serrano, in a similar case of slander. But Ochoa has not been without controversy. According to the Council of the Judiciary, Ochoa has a register of 50 legal proceedings against him. According to police inquiries in the case of the gold network, the lawyer is involved in alleged traffic of influences to favor his clients, the March Game brothers, and the partner of both, Gustavo Jurado. But he is not the only one. So is his son, César Ochoa, a lawyer who served as deputy minister of Justice between March and June 2014. Transcripts of the calls show that on November 23, 2015, Jurado contacted César Ochoa to ask for help, since the Quito Public Prosecutor's Office had issued an incriminating report against Clearprocess and Spartan, and was about to issue an arrest warrant against the businessmen. Ochoa's response surprised police officers: the lawyer asked Jurado to deposit 50 thousand dollars to pull some strings the next day in order to avoid further contrary legal proceedings and detentions. The procedures of Caupolicán Ochoa’s son were unsuccessful. Four days after this call, on November 27, 2015, the police carried out a raid on Jurado and arrested him for illegal possession of weapons, among them were two old carbines and three high-caliber weapons. After Jurado’s arrest, the Ochoa moved their influences so that Jurado was released. According to the investigations, Caupolicán Ochoa tried to intercede in his favor through David Norero, adviser of one of his influential clients: José Serrano, Interior Minister. , On his part, Cesar Ochoa, asked for the name of the judge who had issued the court order against Jurado to request an interview. In another call, on the same November 27, Ochoa’s son requested from the interlocutor another 10 thousand dollars he needed to pay the judge of the case, because five weapons were confiscated in the raid and Jurado was not able to leave "cleanly”. That same night, in a telephone call, Caupolicán was informed that Jurado had already been released, after the judge accepted the payment of 8 thousand dollars. On the same call, they informed Caupolicán Ochoa that the trial against Jurado would begin in the first week of December 2015. The procedures of Caupolicán through his former client did not work for a reason: Minister Serrano knew the details of the case and did not want any of the Ochoa to intervene, because he knew that “more things” would come out, since he had all the information from the National Directorate for Combating Organized Crime. Three days after Jurado's arrest and his efforts to remove him from prison, Ochoa suspected that his phone was being intercepted and he avoided talking about the case. However, authorities continued to record the phone calls received by Correa's lawyer.
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The criminal route of Ecuadorian gold
For instance, on December 1, another call to Ochoa was intercepted informing him that his client Alberto March had sent him an email explaining his willingness to negotiate an agreement with the Ecuadorian Internal Revenue Service SRI. In the call, they clarified that the complaints that were affecting his clients were related to the activities of Clearprocess, since a supplier registered in the RISE system had denounced it. They also informed him that Jurado was concerned about a possible trial against him for illegal possession of weapons, and there was also another accusation for identity theft. In that call, Ochoa committed himself to negotiate with the judge in charge of the case to stop the process. The efforts of Caupolicán Ochoa in favor of Jurado were neutralized by his former client José Serrano. The Minister of the Interior ordered the detention of Jurado seven months later to the negotiations, a short time after Serrano was awarded by the DEA, at the beginning of this month, for his achievements in the fight against drug trafficking in Ecuador. Vértice tried to obtain the version of the facts from the March Game brothers, but it did not get an immediate answer. Mails were sent to lawyer Caupolicán Ochoa to confront his version of the events under investigation, they were not answered at the closing of this edition. Sources consulted in the Ecuadorian General Prosecutor's Office declined to comment on an ongoing case. Apparently, Serrano has not been the only high official interested in the case, both for it and against it. Juan Carlos Cassinelli, a former assemblyman and recent Foreign Trade Minister, and Alberto March’s father-in-law, one of the detainees, would have tried to get support from the official block of Alianza Pais, but the version could not be confirmed by Vértice. Besides, Galo Chiriboga, the General Prosecutor, gave his endorsement so that the prosecutor of the case, Diana Salazar, accused the seven businessmen and shareholders detained, for their ties with the alleged network of money laundering through gold, despite the links of those involved with Rafael Correa’s government.
The tsar of intermediation If influence peddling was the tone on this case, the money transfers made by the two companies investigated revealed the links that Spartan and Clearprocess executives also had with businessmen settled in Miami. The Prosecutor's Office’s report specifies that Spartan made transfers for 850 thousand dollars to Naparina Corp. S.A., owned by the businessman from Guayaquil, Vidal Enrique Cadena Marín, a magnate who increased his fortune during Correa's government due to intermediation contracts for the sale of Ecuadorian crude oil to China. According to the researchers, the relationship between the March and Cadena Marin goes beyond a simple transfer and not only has to do with mining businesses but also with services in the oil sector and in other areas through commercial agreements between companies incorporated in Ecuador, the United States, Panama and other tax havens. The March Game and Cadena Marin have also been associated in projects of advice of goods and services that have later been sold to state entities in Ecuador.
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According to documents reviewed by Vértice, Enrique Cadena invested in Spartan, between 2012 and 2013, about 4 million dollars supposedly for joint projects. The transfers were made from the Naparina’s account at Helm Bank to Spartan´s account at JP Morgan Chase Bank, both banking institutions located in the United States. Other Links Major international transactions from Clearprocess and Spartan have been linked to firms and operators based in South Florida. In the case of Clearprocess, the records indicate that it received 123 million 500 thousand dollars in international money from the firm World Precious Metals Refining. And records show that Spartan made 31 transfers of $ 23 million 900 thousand dollars to Doremetals owned by Akar Precious Metal. On the other hand, the investments of the March Game brothers, in the name of Spartan, also consist of at least seven trusts administered by the fiduciary Mossack Fonseca in Panama.
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