The manipulation of the FIU

Santiago Nieto, the defenestrated head of the Financial Intelligence Unit of the Ministry of Finance, has a good public reputation, because it is considered that he was a capable official who worked to clean public life of corruption and abuses. However, the latest research he did at the head of the FIU, which he announced on October 3 after the revelations of the so-called Pandora Papers, shows the opposite: lack of methodological and analytical rigor, superficiality and, above all, lack of professionalism. The investigation is ongoing, but the name of 79 high-profile people – politicians, businessmen and artists – who created or participated in financial schemes in the so-called tax havens, was reported in the press at the start of the management of his successor, Pablo Gómez, who wants to determine if they violated tax obligations or laundered money. The investigation was carried out by Nieto’s team, not Gómez.De according to a technical review of the metadata, Diego Mauricio Ríos Esquivel and Magali González Guillén, responsible for the work, had been Nieto’s collaborators since he presided over the Toluca Regional Chamber of the Judicial Power of the Federation between 2008 and 2013. Ríos Esquivel was deputy director of Strategic Evaluation at the UIF, and González Guillén was general director of the area. The investigation, according to the date of creation of the archive, began on October 4, the day after the Pandora Papers were released.The conclusions of that investigation had two expressions. One was published in five political columns that gave an account of a list typed on paper without identification, which was distributed through photos and where the 79 names appeared. The other, which is the original document of the FIU, is a digital file of an Excel spreadsheet, where their dates of birth are added, which is a basic procedure in the financial system to distinguish homonymies. However, there are some inconsistencies between the two lists. In the file appear three names repeated, although with different dates of birth, Carlos Djemal Nehmad, former partner of Investabank, sentenced in May 2018 in the United States to 75 months in prison for a fraud of 20 million dollars to the government of Mexico in tax refunds; Jacobo Bazbaz Sacal, director of Interprotección, one of the main Mexican insurers, and Amado Yáñez, whom the former director of Pemex, Emilio Lozoya, wanted to remove the oil company Oceanografía for the bad, and to pressure him, the former prosecutor Jesús Murillo Karam accused him of fraud, diversion of resources and tax fraud. And when the two documents are compared, there is only coincidence in 76 names, which does not suggest an error, but a manipulation of the typed and photographed list, as widely circulated after some of its details were published in newspaper columns. The three additional people featured in the FIU’s original digital archive are Uri Emmanuel Ansbacher Bendrama, an Israeli businessman who founded the companies Proyectos y Diseños and KBH Track, which sold – although he denies it – the Pegasus spy software to the Mexican government; Juan Collado, a friend and lawyer of former President Enrique Peña Nieto, currently imprisoned for money laundering and tax fraud, and Lozoya, currently in pretrial detention accused of receiving bribes from the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht, who is said to be the owner of two companies in Isas Vírgenes and account holder in Switzerland, where he received the illegal payments. The original list of the FIU has no additional information to that which can be found publicly on the website of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which obtained the leak of millions of documents from tax havens, which reproduced media from around the world such as the Pandora Papers. Moreover, there are several names that were included in the typed list that, when analyzing the digital Excel file, it turns out that their inclusion was merely circumstantial. For example, in the case of Ansbacher Bendrama, it is pointed out that his two companies in Panama were “possibly” beneficiaries of the sale of Pegasus, or Alberto Bazbaz Sacal, former head of the UIF and the extinct CISEN, who appears only because he is Jacobo’s brother and who “possibly” was a beneficiary of its operations. There is no indication of illegal actions, but several were included in the public list. One of the most surprising to have appeared in it is the American Robert Allen Stanford, who defrauded thousands of people, including dozens of Mexicans, who has been imprisoned in the United States since 2009 and is serving a 110-year sentence for fraud and money laundering. Another is Federico Gertz Manero, brother of the attorney general, who died in 2015, but whose name appears.ece in the Panama Papers, another investigation of the same Journalistic Consortium disseminated in 2016.Forty-seven people who appear on the lists are directly indicated in the Pandora Papers, and the investigation of the UIF does not contribute anything that was already known. There are 32 others who are either secondary figures, or appear as complementary, mentioned without having direct involvement, but whose names had been previously published by the press, such as businessman Daniel Madariaga, who is pointed out in the digital file as “friend and contractor” of the governor of the state of Mexico, Alfredo del Mazo, whose wife Fernanda, a relative of Federico Gertz Manero’s partner, was included because a trust he created in the Virgin Islands in 2008 was linked to the Stanford fund.The FIU’s digital archive has numerous references to people it links to family members’ financial operations, with nothing to support it. That was the way Nieto worked, with media coups without legal solidity, but powerful enough to cause reputational damage. His good reputation as a researcher is as weak as his job, where he abused power and hurt many people. It served for the presidential narrative, but not for justice. That is, nothing will change now with Gomez.



Original source in Spanish