Piñera says he will prove his “total innocence” in the face of an investigation by the Chilean prosecutor’s office

The president of Chile, Sebastian Piñera, said this Friday that he will demonstrate his “total innocence”, after the Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation for the sale of Minera Dominga by a company of his children, an operation for which he appeared in the Pandora Papers.

“We do not share the decision announced today by the prosecution to initiate an investigation into a cause that has already been known and tried”, but “I have full confidence that justice, as it has already done, will confirm the inexistence of irregularities and also my total innocence“, said Pinera in a short message to the country.

The national prosecutor, Jorge Abbott, opened a criminal investigation on Friday to Pinera for the sale of the mining company Dominga in 2010, reported the anti-corruption chief of the Prosecutor’s Office, Marta Herrera.

“As president of Chile, I have never, never, taken any action or carried out any management related to Minera Dominga”, he claimed Pinera in your message, without accepting questions from journalists.

Piñera, whose term ends on March 11, 2022, is one of the rulers who appears in the Pandora Papers investigation, and on Monday he had denied that he had a conflict of interest in the sale of the mining company in 2010 (during his first term) to one of his closest friends.

However, Herrera indicated that “the antecedents could have the character of the crime of bribery, with its correlate of bribery, [y] eventual tax crimes, matters that will ultimately all be the subject of an investigation ”.

The penalty for bribery is five years in prison, said Herrera, who indicated that the sale of Minera Dominga is not “Juged thing”, unlike what it claims Pinera.