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On Tuesday, Ecuador's President Guillermo Lasso asked the Attorney General's Office to investigate his brother-in-law, businessman Danilo Carrera, and requested the dismissal of two national police generals implicated in a corruption scheme uncovered by a digital media outlet, a former government ally.
"The head of state has asked the Public Prosecutor's Office to investigate Danilo Carrera (...) has requested the dismissal of two generals from the ranks of the National Police," says a government statement entitled "The President of the Republic does not overlap anyone."
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The note points out that Lasso never ordered the filing of a police report recently denounced as part of the investigation called "El Gran Padrino" (The Great Godfather).
The revelations implicate Carrera as the head of a network responsible for selling positions and contracts in public companies and indicate that he is very close to political operator Rubén Cherrez, who is himself linked to drug trafficking.
According to reports, the Albanian mafia financed the campaign of candidate Lasso in 2021 with one and a half million dollars.
The government's statement states that "if this investigation was later found to be unfounded, the President of the Republic had nothing to do with that decision."
In the last hours, the digital media La Posta revealed audios in which two people, identified as Generals Mauro Vargas and Giovanni Ponce, from the police high command, allegedly talked about the need to hide the referred police report on alleged links of operators close to the government with drug trafficking, in order not to affect the president.
On Monday, the president of the legislative committee that investigated these facts, Viviana Veloz, said that Lasso knew about this police report and did nothing about it.
The president was also informed of a report by the Anti-Corruption Secretariat about indications of corruption in the government, but he ordered that it not be made public.
The parliament could impeach the president for these allegations, which were investigated by a legislative commission whose final report recommended his impeachment for crimes against public administration and state security.
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