PRM deputy Faride Raful is pointing out contradictions by the government regarding payments to Brazilian publicist Joao Santana, who is in jail in Brazil for corruption. Raful’s previous request for a legislative special commission to investigate documents received from the Controller General Office showing payments made to companies tied to Santana and his wife, was met with a big no in the Chamber of Deputies.
Santana was the electoral strategist for President Danilo Medina’s campaigns in 2012 and 2016. He abruptly returned to Brazil in February 2016 to answer to charges of having played a central role in the massive bribery ring run by Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction giant. As reported, to carry out their bribes, Odebrecht admitted to having based the bribery division in Santo Domingo.
Now, Raful says that videos uploaded to Vimeo after February 2016 provide evidence the payments continued despite the legal case against the Santana’s and their eventual conviction.
She highlighted that several videos produced by Polis Caribe contradict recent statements by Administrative Ministry of the Presidency (Mapfre) that the government had cut contractual relations with the company when the Santanas were sent to jail.
Raful makes the point that the letter rejecting the need to investigate the payments to the Sananas stated that the companies were not contracted after they were jailed. But Raful presents screen shots of the website of the son of Joao Santana and Monica Moura , Ayle Santana (Polis Caribe) as evidence that Polis Caribe produced those commercials a year after Joao was in jail. “Who is lying?” she asks in a tweet. Several videos include credits with Ayle Santana as director and the presence of Polis Caribe Dominican Republic as an advertising agency. The videos are less than a year old.
The government in the statement to the Chamber of Deputies had said the business relations of the Dominican government with Polis Caribe had ended on 3 December 2015, a month after the start of the political campaign for reelection for President Danilo Medina. The reason for the reported severing of ties was that “it was inappropriate that who would be his campaign advisers had at the same time contracts with government institutions.”
Fadul claims that the Dominican government had paid Santana and his companies RD$1.4 billion, continuing to make payments through 2017, despite the husband and wife team being in jail in Brazil. The couple served as presidential campaign advisors to Medina into the 2012 and 2016 election.
Read more:
Listin Diario
Bloomberg
Vimeo
24 July 2018
