“The impeachment trial to remove me is based on false facts”, says Chile’s Piñera

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Chilean President Sebastián Piñera said Wednesday that the impeachment trial initiated against him to remove him from office over a financial scandal revealed in the Pandora papers “is based on false facts” and declared to be “very confident that the Senate is going to dismiss it.”

“We are convinced that this accusation has no basis in fact or law. After a careful reading, we have concluded that it is based on false facts, cunningly told or on simple conjectures”, the conservative president said in a press conference.

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This is the first time that Piñera refers to the matter, after early Tuesday morning the Chamber of Deputies approved in a session of almost 24 hours that the constitutional accusation presented by the opposition (“impeachment” in Chile) advances to the Senate, the body that will be in charge of judging him and where a higher quorum of two-thirds is required.

The impeachment trial will begin to be discussed on Tuesday in the Senate, just a few days before Chile holds on November 21 the most meaningful and uncertain elections in its recent history in which precisely Piñera’s successor will be decided.

“This accusation obeys the rarefied climate of Chilean politics and that Chileans could observe in the long night in which this accusation was debated in Congress and that in our opinion has a clear and unjustified electoral interest”, added the governor.

The opposition accuses him of having failed in the principle of “probity” and “seriously compromising the honor of the Nation” after the Pandora papers revealed alleged irregularities in the sale in British Virgin Islands of Dominga Mining to a close friend of the presidential family nine months after he took office for his first non-consecutive term (2010-2014).

As revealed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the sale of the project was to take place in three installments. Still, the last one was conditional on the area not being declared environmentally protected, a decision that was up to Piñera, who could have incurred a conflict of interest.

One of Chile’s most enormous fortunes, the president defends that he disassociated himself from his businesses through blind trusts in 2009 and that what was revealed was already dismissed in 2017. However, the Public Prosecutor’s Office has opened a new investigation.

“It was decreed that there was no irregularity, and my total innocence was established,” insisted Piñera, who remains in office but will not be able to leave the country until the process is over.

This is the most advanced impeachment trial against a president in the country’s history and is the second attempt to try Piñera politically, after the failed attempt in November 2019 for alleged human rights violations amid the social outburst, the most severe protests since the end of the dictatorship.