Ecuador Seeks Six Years for Lenín Moreno in $76m Bribe Case

Rule of Law

Lenín Moreno sat in Ecuador’s national court on Wednesday and listened to a prosecutor ask that he be sent to prison for six and a half years. Beside him sat his wife, and among the twenty defendants sat a man who was once China’s ambassador to the country.

The charge is cohecho, the Spanish term for bribery. The alleged scheme surrounds Coca Codo Sinclair, a fifteen-hundred-megawatt hydroelectric plant in the Amazon that supplies close to a third of Ecuador’s electricity.

Prosecutors closed their case after twenty-nine days of hearings. The tribunal has ruled nothing, and every defendant is presumed innocent.

What Lenín Moreno is accused of doing

The conduct alleged happened before he was president. Moreno served as vice-president under Rafael Correa, and the prosecution says he intervened to secure the award, the financing and the execution of the dam.

He is accused as a direct author, one of seven. Fourteen others face the lesser charge of complicity, his wife among them.

The state’s evidence runs to nineteen expert reports, twenty-nine witness statements and judicial assistance from five countries. Moreno did not testify, citing ill health, and his lawyer has asked publicly why Correa is not in the dock.

The money went round in a circle

Here the case stops being about one man. The prosecutor’s own published case file sets out the financial architecture, and it repays a slow read.

The tender required bidders to bring their own financing. China’s Eximbank duly lent Ecuador about one point six eight billion dollars, eighty-five percent of the cost, to pay a Chinese state contractor.

Ecuador covered the remaining fifteen percent, some two hundred and ninety-seven million dollars of its own money. The total contract came to one point nine eight billion.

Prosecutors say about four percent of that value came back out as bribes, seventy-six million dollars, moving from a Bank of China account in Beijing into a Panamanian account held by a small Ecuadorean trading company. That company had changed its stated line of business two months before it opened the account.

Now hold the two figures together. The alleged bribe is worth about a quarter of everything Ecuador itself put into the dam, and the country is still repaying the loan that funded the rest.

The former president is the name, not the centre

Read the distribution the prosecution alleges and the headline rearranges itself. Fifty-eight point eight million dollars, some seventy-seven percent of the pot, went to a network around Conto Patiño, a personal friend of Moreno who acted as Sinohydro’s commercial representative.

Prosecutors say he opened the accounts that received the four percent. Moreno’s circle, by contrast, is said to have received a little over one million dollars in total.

The itemised figure attributed to the former president himself is six hundred and sixty thousand dollars, a house and furniture among it. That is under one percent of the sum the state says changed hands.

The same six and a half years is sought for all twenty, from the former head of state to a mother-in-law alleged to have received five thousand dollars. Also sought are fines, a ban on holding office or contracting with the state, and full reparation of the seventy-six million.

A plaque on a cracked dam

The prosecution has asked for one thing no wire report leads with. It wants the convicted to apologise publicly to the Ecuadorean people at the plant itself, and a plaque installed there.

Consider what that plaque would be bolted to. Coca Codo Sinclair has been plagued by thousands of cracks in the parts that turn water into current, the state utility has pursued Sinohydro internationally, and a Chinese state successor now runs the plant under an annual contract.

For a reader in London weighing Chinese state lending across the region, this is the datapoint. An accredited ambassador stands accused of active bribery, and prosecutors say he received forty thousand dollars.

The case began in 2019 with a journalistic investigation into an offshore vehicle, in the year Moreno also ended Julian Assange’s asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy. The tribunal now deliberates on whether any of the prosecution’s twenty-eight factual premises survive.

Has Lenín Moreno been convicted?

No, prosecutors have only requested a sentence. The tribunal must still weigh the evidence, and Moreno denies the accusations.

What is the Sinohydro case about?

Prosecutors allege the Chinese state builder paid about seventy-six million dollars to win and execute the contract for Ecuador’s largest hydroelectric plant.

Why is a Chinese ambassador a defendant?

The prosecution accuses Cai Runguo of joining meetings with the then vice-president, promoting the project’s financing and receiving forty thousand dollars.