The Financial Intelligence Unit of Mexico is investigating the former head of the Sinaloa Cartel to take advantage of the tax advantages of the European principality to launder money, according to local media.
The Mexican government is investigating the alleged money laundering carried out by Joaquín “el Chapo” Guzmán for a decade in Andorra for at least 108 million pesos (more than 52.6 billion dollars), the newspaper Mil·lenni revealed on Monday .
The Mexican media accessed a report by the Government Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) that documented at least 22 phantom companies with transactions in the European principality and which, in turn, have links with 72 companies that they have served in the Sinaloa Cartel.
“There is a well-founded suspicion that this is only a tiny fraction of what moved by the cartel towards the Andorran financial system,” he quoted the media based on the report.
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The EFE agency said it contacted the FIU to corroborate the report, but officials replied that they would not give official information at the moment, although they also did not deny the authenticity of the report.
Although the former head of the Sinaloa Cartel faces a life sentence in the United States since 2019, the leak of the FIU coincides with open investigations against Mexican politicians for their links to the criminal group or for accounts in Andorra.
Just last March 10, it transpired that the Mexican government is investigating Manlio Fabio Beltrones (2015-2016), former president of the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and his daughter, Senator Sylvana Beltrones, to hide 10,400,000 of dollars in Andorra.
After leaking this information to the newspaper El País, the head of the FIU, Santiago Nieto, acknowledged that he had asked the Andorran authorities for information on 23 people “mentioned in the media”.
In addition, the director of the UIF revealed last Friday in the Chamber of Deputies that the governor of the northern state of Tamaulipas, Francisco García Cap de Vaca, had bought real estate through two ghost companies that on other occasions used the Sinaloa cartel to launder money.
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García Cap de Vaca, governor of Tamaulipas since 2016 with the right-wing and opposition National Action Party (PAN), is facing a political trial in the Chamber of Deputies for a corruption complaint filed by the Attorney General’s Office.
According to the Millennium Report, the FIU found that the companies in front of the Chapo with transactions in Andorra were founded to also serve other drug cartels and for crimes related to acts of corruption, diversion of public resources and tax evasion.
The report stated that they are fake corporations in which links have already been detected with other investigations such as those of former President Enrique Peña Nieto’s lawyer, Juan Collado, the Odebrecht corruption network and even the Master Scam. for which the ex-secretary Rosary oaks is stopped.
The UIF report has detailed that Manuel Eduardo Rodríguez, considered the main financial operator of the Chapo, and who is a fugitive, resorted to the façade companies to transfer capital from Mexico to Andorra to launder money from the Cartel of Sinaloa and Colombian drug trafficking groups.
According to the local media, local authorities consider that the criminal structure of “el Chapo” “benefited from the laxity of the financial system of Andorra, which until 2018 served as one of the most important tax havens in the world.”
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