The digital medium confirms that the tax auditors have manipulated the financial information provided. According to APES, “the government uses state institutions to prosecute those media that are uncomfortable with it.”
The digital newspaper El Faro denounced, through an editorial published this Wednesday, that the government of President Nayib Bukele he continues his attacks on his journalistic work.
In the text entitled “The government is filing another case against El Faro,” the media condemns that the government is falsely accusing them of tax evasion for $ 33.7 thousand, after receiving preliminary conclusions from an audit involving the media. it had been presented by the Ministry of Finance for nearly a year.
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In these conclusions, according to the El Faro editorial, the Treasury notes that in 2017 the media avoided taxes on income from 2018. “This absurdity has only one explanation: it is not the mission of the Treasury accountants who have been investigating us since July 2020. to promote the interests of the state or to pursue evaders, but to obey the warrants for the arrest of the presidential house, ”the text read.
El Faro claims that “in his undemocratic obsession with destroying critical voices or those who do not honor him, President Nayib Bukele is pressuring his entire state apparatus to function as a machine of persecution and belittling those votes.”
The lawyers of Trípode, the company that owns El Faro, They had already filed an appeal for amparo in the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court, in September 2020, because of the harassment they faced by the treasury.
On that occasion, the lawyers confirmed that the aforementioned ministry had subjected the newspaper to an audit that “ also included requests for information that exceeded the tax intensity, such as the full minutes books of El Faro’s board of directors, which also included editorial nature, or the interim reports on the implementation of projects with foundations and international cooperation organizations ”.
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In addition to the allegation of alleged tax evasion, the paper also denounces that, “with an even weaker existence,” the Treasury also accuses them of not giving up alleged subscription revenues “for its Citizen Excavation program.
According to the Treasury, the media must declare those unique contributions as a fixed monthly income and pay the resulting taxes, which, according to the editorial, “is an act of treason,” since no such income exists.
Faced with allegations from the Ministry of Finance, El Faro confirms that it has all documentation in order, while reiterating that it has paid all taxes required by law in a timely manner for 20 years.
“It should be reiterated that those auditors are acting under higher orders, with the aim of starting a case that supports the a priori verdict announced by the president himself in September 2020,” the editorial said, clearly referring to the statements he made to Bukele. on a national chain, claiming that there was evidence of a serious case of money laundering in El Faro.
For the media, the Treasury Department has made efforts to build a version that supports the president’s words, but they lack evidence and arguments, the paper said.
“Nayib Bukele’s presidency wants to silence us. And since all of its systems of espionage, smear networks, information concealment, defamation and threats weren’t enough to silence us, it now resorts to setting up cases against us, ”the media underlined in their editorial.
New allegations against El Faro are causing the Salvadoran journalism union
Given what has happened, the Association of Journalists of El Salvador (APES) is concerned that the government continues to attack the independent press.
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“It is clear how Nayib Bukele’s government is using state institutions to prosecute those media that are, in his words, uncomfortable,” said the union’s representative, Angélica Cárcamo, in an interview with the EFE agency.
For Cárcamo, “those kinds of gadgets that are being invented are worrisome” and “I am very sorry about this situation that arises, which is not typical of democratic governments.”
“What is being attempted here is a government story to establish that the media, El Faro, for example, is dodging taxes. What we are going to try is to create a story of that style that discredits the media, ”said the communicator.
In early February, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) took precautions in favor of 34 members of El Faro who, it warned, “would be exposed to harassment, threats, intimidation and stigmatization”.
In early March, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court (CSJ) of El Salvador admitted an amparo lawsuit against the Treasury for alleged use of an audit to obtain information on “editorial line, journalistic methodology, sources and ongoing investigations” by El Faro .