American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture
This time in Nigeria,
As you may recall, Petrobras to pay $2.95 billion to settle U.S. corruption lawsuit earlier this year.
The Pemex-Odebrecht cases are still in the headlines.
And who could forget the UN’s oil-for-food?
It’s enough to make one suspect that government-owned and UN-connected agencies are ripe for the picking.
The Justice Department dismissed its case against New Jersey Democrat Senator Robert Menendez, and will not re-try:
The decision is a major victory for Menendez and the Democratic Party, which was facing the prospect of having the 12-year incumbent facing a corruption trial while running for what should be one of its safest Senate seats.
It also comes a week after Judge William Walls damaged the prosecution’s case by acquitting Menendez and [Solomon] Melgen on seven of the 18 corruption counts they had faced during a two-and-a-half-month trial last fall. The trial ended in a hung jury, with one juror telling reporters that 10 of the 12 members of the panel favored acquittal on most counts.
. . .
Menendez was charged in 2015 with doing official favors for Melgen in exchange for private jet flights, lavish vacations — including luxury hotel stays — and hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions. Federal prosecutors also charged Menendez with willfully leaving Melgen’s gifts off his Senate financial disclosure forms.
Menendez had gone against the Obama administration’s key foreign policy regarding the Iran deal and Cuba, Russia, and also in his
support of dissidents from countries other than Cuba: He vigorously supports the State of Israel against Iran-sponsored Hamas in Gaza, which also figures in his support of international sanctions against the Iranian nuclear program – sanctions that Ecuador and Venezuela attempt to help Iran avoid. And, by the way, last year the story was that Menendez was allegedly helping a pair of Ecuadorian fugitive bankers.
The “Ecuadorian fugitive bankers” are brothers William and Roberto Isaías, who fled Ecuador ten years ago after the government allegedly confiscated media outlets they owned which were critical of the government. They are here legally.
Last November a judge declared a mistrial over a deadlocked jury.
For now, Menendez is off the hook.
He’s expected to run for reelection in November.
I’ve been following the Menendez-Melgen story from the start here and here.
Cross-posted at WoW! Magazine.
Corruption: ARMED FEDERAL AGENTS ENTER WAREHOUSE IN PUERTO RICO TO SEIZE HOARDED ELECTRIC EQUIPMENT
ON SATURDAY, A day after becoming aware of a massive store of rebuilding materials being held by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the U.S. federal government — the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, along with their security detail — entered a Palo Seco warehouse owned by the public utility to claim and distribute the equipment, according to a spokesperson for the Corps.
. . .
“Due to the size of the warehouse,” Vera said, accounting for everything contained therein is still underway days later. Among the materials recovered so far are “2,875 pieces of critical material to contractors” along with the sleeves of full-tension steel, a component of Puerto Rican electrical infrastructure required to erect new power lines. PREPA did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, though in a statement to the Associated Press, it rejected allegations that it had failed to distribute the warehouse’s contents. The AP only reported that “officials over the weekend also discovered some needed materials in a previously overlooked warehouse owned by Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority.” How they discovered them and how they were obtained is a story that has not been fully told.
Read it and weep.
The US has imposed sanctions on 10 Venezuelan officials it accuses of undermining democracy, corruption and censoring the press, for a total of forty, including Nicolás Maduro.
The ten have had their US assets frozen and are also banned from travelling to the country, while American businesses are forbidden to work with them.
The treasury department also issued bans against several members of Venezuela’s all-powerful Constituent Assembly, including a vice-president.
In other news,
Ambassadors of European Union member states agreed on Wednesday to impose an arms embargo on Venezuela.
They also said there would be a ban on any equipment which could be used to repress opponents within Venezuela.
The sanctions come after a UN report released in August accused Venezuela of human rights violations and using excessive force against the opposition.
Caracas Chronicles calls it A Bad Day for the Dictatorship.
Not bad enough. They’re still in charge.
UPDATE
Russia rushes to #Venezuela's rescue for the 3rd time this year! Getting in bed with incompetent #Maduro in order to pursue their own foreign policy objectives. https://t.co/P46WwGrzLn
— Prof. Steve Hanke (@steve_hanke) November 9, 2017
At Drudge Report:
J.J. Sefton says it best:
The news dropped over the weekend that Robert “Torque-your-mudder” Mueller is going to lay off the first charges in this phony PDT/Russia Collusion witch hunt. After 10 months where it has now been confirmed that that so-called “dossier” was a fabricated piece of fiction cooked up by a left-wing smear agency disguised as opposition researchers, and that said fiction was bought and paid for by a combination of a never-Trumper media outlet and Clinton & Obama, then disseminated by Hillary’s campaign and the Obama-corrupted intelligence/law enforcement apparatus, we now have a crooked cop who is up to his long neck in real corruption and collusion with the Russians to goniff 20% of our strategic uranium and payoff the Clinton Crime Family while covering it up about to railroad an innocent party and perpetuate the lie that Trump is illegitimate and attempt to overthrow the 2016 election.
I apologize for my William Faulkner imitation with that sentence, but a run-on seems the only way I could get that all out. Robert Mueller should have been fired months ago. Actually Snoozy McSnoozerson should never have recused himself and then allow Deep State insurrectionists like Mueller, Rosenstein, McCabe and all the rest to have metastasized to where we are today. Water over the bridge. Mueller must be fired immediately, no matter what the political fallout may be. In any case the media, Democrats and their RINO confederates have been so thoroughly exposed that I expect a majority of real Americans would cheer the firing and amp up the cries for real justice to be visited upon Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Loretta Lynch, James Comey, Mueller himself and anyone connected with Uranium 1 and the Clinton/DNC e-mail cover-up. We are rotting from within and if justice is not done, as I fear it will not be, it will be a cancer on our society with extremely dangerous repercussions.
Blogging on LatAm shall continue later.
UPDATE
Scott Johnson:
Whoever leaked news of the indictment to CNN [last Friday] is guilty of serious wrongdoing. That’s a big story too, but CNN isn’t going to help us out on that angle.
. . .
the charges, while “not immediately clear,” do not appear to have anything to do with “collusion.”
The Manafort Indictment: Not Much There, and a Boon for Trump
Text of the indictment below:
Remember last year’s Rio Olympics? Allegedly the Committee chief was the bag man:
Read my post Olympic-sized corruption: Sixteen bars of gold
You read it right: half a billion $US, out of $9 billion (emphasis added),
Brazil’s attorney general on Tuesday accused former presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff and some of their political allies of embezzling around $500 million between 2002 and 2016, a period encompassing all of the leftist party’s 13 years in power.
Attorney General Rodrigo Janot said that during Mr. da Silva’s and Ms. Rousseff’s terms, the suspects, all members of the Workers’ Party, or PT, used state-run companies to pocket taxpayer money.
Mr. Janot’s office said in a press release that the alleged scheme cost at least $9 billion to public coffers. Mr. Janot sent the charges to the Supreme Court, which has an undefined amount of time to either accept or dismiss them before any trial is launched.
Brazilian ex-presidents accused of forming criminal group.
At the BBC,
Mr Janot said that Lula was the head of the alleged organization, and that the Workers’ Party received some $480m (£370m) in bribes in several public entities, including Petrobras and the Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES).
The scheme allegedly started with Lula’s victorious election campaign in 2002 and ended when Ms Rousseff was impeached last year, Mr Janot added in a 230-page document.
Dilma says there’s no evidence.
Lula’s running for president next year, if his appeal against a corruption conviction is successful.
Over in Argentina, former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who came to power when her husband Néstor Kirchner died suddenly of a heart condition, sees a storm is threat’ning.
Read my post, Gimme shelter, says Cristina in Argentina.
