Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno on Thursday asked the country’s prosecutor to probe $4.9 billion of oil-related infrastructure projects, alleging that the OPEC nation’s money was looted during the decade-long tenure of his leftist predecessor.<\/p>\n
Moreno said there were massive cost overruns, operational failings and non-transparent bidding processes at the five projects built during Rafael Correa’s presidency, including a $2.2 billion upgrade to the Esmeraldas refinery.<\/p>\n
“Nearly $5 billion of Ecuadoreans’ money, when it should have cost half that,” Moreno said in a national broadcast. “This theft of public funds cannot go unpunished.”<\/p>\n
Moreno took office in May 2017 after earning Correa’s endorsement during the campaign, but the two later fell out over Moreno’s market-friendly policies.<\/p>\n
Last year, Moreno asked a United Nations unit to conduct a technical and economic review of the five projects undertaken by the previous administration.<\/p>\n
Correa has denied allegations of corruption in his administration, calling them a political smear campaign. He lives in Belgium and has not returned to Ecuador since a judge last year ordered that he be jailed as part of a case involving the kidnapping of a lawmaker, in which he denies involvement.<\/p>\n
The other projects Moreno mentioned included a natural gas liquefaction plant, a seaport, a fuel distribution center, a pipeline and a partly-built refinery that has run out of financing after receiving some $1.5 billion in investment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno on Thursday asked the country’s prosecutor to probe $4.9 billion of oil-related infrastructure projects, alleging that the OPEC nation’s money was looted during the decade-long tenure of his leftist predecessor. Moreno said there were massive cost overruns, operational failings and non-transparent bidding processes at the five projects built during Rafael Correa’s presidency, including a $2.2 billion upgrade to the Esmeraldas refinery. “Nearly $5 billion of Ecuadoreans’ money, when it should have cost half that,” Moreno said in a national broadcast. “This theft of public funds cannot go unpunished.” Moreno took office in May 2017 after earning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[133],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oil-gas"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211376\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}