Nicaragua – Financial Treason & Crime

For democracy, it’s a time of swimming against the tide

Tim Sullivan, 12 July 2021

The old Nicaraguan revolutionary, with his receding hairline and the goatee that he had finally let turn grey, spoke calmly into the camera as police swarmed toward his house, hidden behind a high wall in a leafy Managua neighborhood. Surveillance drones, he said, were watching overhead.

Decades earlier, Hugo Torres had been a revered guerrilla in the fight against right-wing dictator Anastasio Somoza. In 1974, he’d taken a group of top officials hostage, then traded them for the release of imprisoned comrades. Among those prisoners was Daniel Ortega, a Marxist bank robber who would become Nicaragua’s elected president and later its authoritarian ruler. Continue reading “Article: For democracy, it’s a time of swimming against the tide”

Britain targets 22 people with new anti-corruption sanctions

JILL LAWLESS , 26 April 2021

LONDON — Britain imposed asset freezes and travel bans Monday on 22 people accused of bribery, kickbacks and fraud in its first use of new sanctions powers to target corruption around the world.

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told lawmakers that the sanctions would prevent the U.K. from being used as “a haven for dirty money.”

The list includes 14 Russians implicated in a $230 million tax fraud and three members of the Gupta business family who are enmeshed in a corruption scandal in South Africa. Britain is also sanctioning businessman Ashraf Seed Ahmed Al-Cardinal, accused of stealing state assets in impoverished South Sudan, and individuals from Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala. Continue reading “Article: Britain targets 22 people with new anti-corruption sanctions”