Piñera, the president who has weathered business scandals for 40 years

The Dominga mining case revealed in the Pandora papers is the latest in a series of business scandals that has plagued the current president of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, one of the great fortunes of the country.

Everyone has ended up succeeding, but the sale in a tax haven of the mining megaproject has him politically and judicially cornered and threatens to ruin the four months that he has left to finish the mandate.

The Chamber of Deputies will vote this Monday if the opposition’s request to remove him is pertinent, after a commission of five parliamentarians recommended last Friday in a non-binding report that the impeachment should not succeed.

If the prosecution achieves an absolute majority in the Lower House, it will go to the Senate, the body that acts as a judge and where two-thirds of the votes are needed to remove the president.

The victory in the Chamber of Deputies was almost assured before the contagion of covid-19 of the leftist presidential Gabriel Boric turned the campaign and the legislative agenda upside down, since several opposition deputies (including the Boric) are in quarantine and may not be able to vote, since it is a face-to-face instance.

“DAMAGES AND NOT BENEFITS”

The genesis of the impeachment trial, which runs alongside a criminal investigation for possible tax and bribery crimes, lies in the alleged irregularities in the sale of Dominga for 152 million dollars by a company owned by Piñera’s children in British Virgin Islands, just nine months after he took office for his first term (2010-2014).

As revealed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the sale of the project to the friend of the presidential family Carlos Alberto Délano had to take place in three installments, but the last was conditional on the area not being declared of environmental protection, a decision that depended on Piñera.

The president defends that he dissociated himself from his businesses through blind trusts in 2009 and that what was revealed in Pandora’s papers was already investigated and dismissed in 2017.

“As president I have never stopped privileging the common good over any other interest and, in fact, being president has meant personal harm and not benefits”, he maintained after the publication of the Pandora papers.

FROM BANCO DE TALCA TO LAN AIRLINE

Piñera, 71, has an estimated fortune of 2,900 million dollars, a wealth that does not come from his cradle and that he has forged over the years in different investments, which involve everything from airlines to soccer teams and supermarkets.

After obtaining a doctorate in Economics at Harvard University, United States, he started in the real estate business and at the end of the 1970s he went to banking, where he faced his first major setback as general manager of Banco de Talca.

Judge Luis Correa Bulo ordered his arrest in 1982 as the alleged person responsible for loans to companies for more than 200 million dollars, violating the legal limit that only allows a maximum of 25% of bank reserves.

Piñera was a fugitive for 24 days until the Supreme Court unanimously accepted an appeal for protection presented by his defense.

Ultimately, he was not convicted and the Banco de Talca went bankrupt. The Minister of Justice of the moment, Mónica Madariaga, declared years later that she interceded “unduly” on his behalf.

In 1997, when he was a senator and minority shareholder of the electricity company Enersis, Piñera denounced the majority partners for selling the company to Spain’s Endesa with favorable conditions for them.

At the same time, he was developing an advantageous agreement with Endesa and ended up selling his shares: “I am not willing to be a masochist and lose part of my assets,” he justified himself at the time.

The next scandal occurred almost a decade later, in 2006, when, being the majority shareholder of LAN (now LATAM), it received a financial report that had not been published by the airline and bought three million shares.

During his first term and in full trial for the maritime boundary between Peru and Chile in The Hague, one of his companies bought shares in the Peruvian fishing company Exalmar, which benefited from the result of the judgment.

After a nine-month investigation, the Prosecutor’s Office dismissed the existence of crimes and closed the case.