Former President of Paraguay justifies the appearance of his name in the Pandora Papers

The former president of Paraguay Horacio Cartes justified this Monday the appearance of his name in the “Pandora Papers”By admitting that in 2011 he acquired a company in Panama through which he claimed to have bought an apartment for his son in Miami, United States.

“What he did was something absolutely legal and with a very clear purpose,” his spokesman, Carlos Palacios, said at a press conference.

“The recommendation he received from a Florida law firm is that to buy real estate in this area, the usual thing is to do it through limited liability companies”, expanded the spokesperson, legal advisor to the ex-president.

The Name from Cards, a tobacco industrial millionaire from Paraguay, appears in an investigation known as “Pandora Papers”, Specifically as a beneficiary of Dominicana Acquisition SA, a company incorporated in Panama in 2011 through OMC Group. The latter is a consulting company that is mainly dedicated to the incorporation of companies in the Central American country.

Several presidents and former presidents of Latin American countries appear on lists aired by the investigation of an international consortium of investigative journalists.

Cards It only included last September the offshore company that it had not mentioned in sworn statements submitted to the Comptroller of the Republic, said Armindo Torres, director of Sworn Declarations on Monday.

“Rectification is a right and there are no established deadlines to do so”, Torres said.

The lawyer Palacios insisted that “the answer is very simple: in 2011 Mr. Cards he decided to make an investment to acquire an apartment in Miami ”.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Euclides Acevedo, described as “disturbing, I do not know if alarming” the revelation of the “Pandora Papers”, When journalists asked him about it on Monday after a meeting with President Mario Abdo Benítez at the Government Palace.

“At the moment it falls into the media world. There is no judicial investigation. We are at a stage around the world where transparency is important, that business is public. As they are public, they are legal, ”he said.

“The public man must make his management public. It has nothing to hide. The innocence of the common citizen is presumed, but since he is a public official, his guilt is presumed, ”Acevedo observed.

The “Pandora Papers” are 11.9 million leaked documents, in whose archives 35 leaders including 14 Latin Americans appear.

“Offshore companies” are the accounts established in countries other than the tax domicile of their administrators. They are considered legal as long as the owner declares them in the country in which he resides.

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