According to local media, Mexico’s Financial Intelligence Unit is investigating the former head of the Sinaloa cartel for taking advantage of the European principality’s tax advantages to launder money.
The Mexican government is investigating alleged money laundering that Joaquín “el Chapo” Guzmán carried out in Andorra for at least 108 million pesos (more than $ 52.6 billion) over a decade, Milenio newspaper revealed Monday.
The Mexican media has gained access to a report from the government’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) documenting at least 22 shell companies with transactions in the European principality and which in turn are associated with 72 trading companies that have the Sinaloa cartel served.
“There is well-founded suspicion that this is only a minuscule fraction of what moved the cartel to the Andorran financial system,” the broker quoted on the basis of the report.
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The EFE agency said it had contacted FIU to confirm the report, but officials replied that they would not provide official information at this time, although they did not deny the report’s authenticity.
Although the former head of the Sinaloa cartel has been serving a life sentence in the United States since 2019, the FIU leak coincides with open investigations against Mexican politicians for their links to the criminal group or for accounts in Andorra.
It was only revealed on March 10 that the Mexican government is investigating Manlio Fabio Beltrones (2015-2016), former president of the former Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and his daughter, Senator Sylvana Beltrones, for hiding 10.4 million dollar in Andorra.
After he leaked this information into the newspaper El País, FIU chief Santiago Nieto acknowledged that he had asked the Andorran authorities for information about 23 people who were “mentioned in the media”.
In addition, the director of the FIU revealed to the Chamber of Deputies last Friday that the governor of the northern state of Tamaulipas, Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca, would have bought property through two shell companies that the Sinaloa cartel used on other occasions to launder money. .
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García Cabeza de Vaca, governor of Tamaulipas since 2016 in the right-wing and opposition National Action Party (PAN), is facing a political trial in the Chamber of Deputies over a corruption complaint filed by the Attorney General’s office.
According to the Millennium Report, FIU found that Chapo’s transaction-related cover companies in Andorra were set up to serve other drug cartels as well as for crimes related to corruption, misuse of public funds and tax evasion.
The report confirmed that they are bogus companies with links to other investigations already discovered, such as those of former president Enrique Peña Nieto’s former attorney, Juan Collado, the Odebrecht corruption network and even the Master Scam, for which former secretary Rosario has been imprisoned. oak.
The FIU report stated that Manuel Eduardo Rodríguez, considered Chapo’s main financial operator, and who is on the run, resorted to front companies to transfer capital from Mexico to Andorra to get money from the Sinaloa cartel and Colombian drug trafficking groups. launder.
According to local media, local authorities believe that the criminal structure of “El Chapo” “benefited from the laxity of the Andorran financial system, which served as one of the most important tax havens in the world until 2018.”
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