Ecuadorian court freezes former president’s bank account in investigation | Corruption News

The court order freezes the bank accounts of former President Rafael Correa and 19 others as part of a corruption investigation.

Ecuador’s Attorney General’s Office has announced that a local court has frozen the bank accounts of many former businessmen and government officials, including former President Rafael Correa and members of his administration, who were convicted of violating campaign finance laws last year.

Correa and 19 others, including his former vice president who is in jail for another corruption case, were accused of accepting $ 7.5 million in bribes between 2012 and 2016 in exchange for public contracts to fund his party’s election campaigns.

An Ecuadorian judge sentenced the former president, who served between 2007 and 2017, to eight years in prison in 2020, but has been living in Belgium since he resigned four years ago, avoiding justice in his home country.

In addition to the jail time, the convicts were ordered to pay a total of $ 14.7 million to the government, with varying amounts depending on their sentences.

Only three of the 20 convicted in the case so far have paid off the debt, all of them employers, the Attorney General’s Office said on Friday.

In a statement, the office also said that after the kidnapping accounts, “it will ask the same court to seize the property registered in the name of the convicted persons.”

Correa, 58, also has an arrest warrant for the alleged kidnapping of a political opponent and has been banned from participating in politics for 25 years.

His lawyers could not be immediately put to comment.

The former leader has denied the allegations, saying they are a political attack on former President Lenin Moreno, which Correa initially backed when Moreno was elected in 2017.

In August 2020, the Attorney General’s Office set up a Property Recovery Unit with the goal of facilitating justice in cases of corruption of former public officials.