El Salvador Overpaid $7 Million to Shell Company for Undelivered Milk During Pandemic
Thursday, August 22, 2024
Jimmy Alvarado and Jonny Wrate*
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In the chaotic first week of the Covid pandemic, El Salvador paid an offshore company $27 million USD to provide milk powder for its hungry citizens — but the shell firm overcharged and under-delivered, pocketing $7 million, a government audit found.
The 2021 audit —which probed the entire food distribution program, involving several firms and products— revealed little about the company tapped to deliver milk powder.
Now, reporting by El Faro and OCCRP has shed light on the opaque company.
Aroum Group Inc. is registered in the British Virgin Islands, where regulations provide corporate anonymity. But the company’s website reveals the identity of one person involved with the firm.
The man who set up Aroum Group’s website was a Venezuelan named Wiomar Castillo, who described himself on LinkedIn as the firm’s “international trade manager.”
Castillo’s role, if any, in securing the contract for Aroum Group is unclear. He is from the same Venezuelan city as Tomás Hernández, an advisor to El Salvador’s president, but it is not known if they are personally acquainted.
More:
https://elfaro.net/en/202408/el_salvador/27536/el-salvador-overpaid-7-million-to-shell-company-for-undelivered-milk-during-pandemic
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Sunday, September 19, 2021
Efren Lemus y Carlos Martínez
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A criminal investigation in El Salvador found evidence that Bukele’s vice minister of justice and Bureau of Prisons director, Osiris Luna, embezzled $1.6 million worth of food between September and November of 2020 from the Public Health Emergency Program (PES), a government storehouse of goods purchased during the pandemic to feed affected families.
Then, with the help of his own mother as negotiator, Luna resold these goods to a merchant criminally accused twice of selling contraband.
Also responsible, prosecutors allege, were at least two other members of Bukele’s cabinet: María Chichilco, minister of local development, and Franklin Alberto Castro Rodríguez, former vice minister of governance and territorial development, who at the time of the alleged crimes was the coordinator of PES. Prosecutors labeled Chichilco and Castro as “direct authors” of the embezzlement for allowing Luna to take control of government goods that they administered.
Prosecutors determined that Luna was a “necessary accomplice” to the crime of embezzlement because he was an “intermediary for the acquisition” of a total of 38,500 bottles of oil and 43,000 sacks of rice, sugar, and beans property of the government, which were sold to a third party rather than delivered to families affected by the coronavirus.
More:
https://elfaro.net/en/202109/el_salvador/25736/top-bukele-official-embezzled-1-6-million-in-covid-19-emergency-food-supplies
The President who has described himself as "the world's coolest dictator" also expects to be considered the Latin American President who is absolutely deadly against crime of all kinds. (As long as it comes from the "lower" class, that is.)
