The Odebrecht corruption scandal, perhaps the biggest story of this year 2017, stays in the news as business leader Antonio Taveras Guzman spoke out yesterday regarding the messages and actions by the government of the United States regarding the handling of the case. Taveras Guzman said that he felt that the US was seriously questioning the integrity of Dominican institutions and appeared to place doubt about the application of the rule of law in the country.
According to the business leader, who is the president of the Association of Industries in Herrera, if the Dominican Republic had a truly functioning legal system that imposed sanctions in cases of unlawful behavior and if the Justice Department were truly independent, the people would not be suffering the consequences of shame and embarrassment of seeing foreign countries insinuating the weakness of the legal system in Dominican society in addressing one of the largest scandals in its entire history.
Taveras Guzman said that the suspension of the travel visa and the freezing of assets in the United States of one of the accused (Angel Rondon Rijo) is a clear message to Dominican authorities concerning the apparent lack of rigorous administering of justice in the Dominican Republic. He said that the article published in a local newspaper by Robert Copley, the Charge d’ Affairs at the United States Embassy in Santo Domingo, was from start to finish a brief account of the scant institutional development of the country and portrays a lack of confidence in the local justice system.
Taveras Guzmán also pointed out that the lack of confidence in the justice system serves to put a brake on private investment in the country that is necessary for economic growth and that creates unrest in the business sectors and among the companies already established in the DR. He noted that the article written by the acting US ambassador stressed that with the exception of the Dominican Republic, in all those countries where Odebrecht bribes were handed out, there have been clear and forceful legal consequences of these misdeeds, “while here the legal actions taken are more like a distraction than a case that is being seriously adjudicated in the courts.”
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27 December 2017
