An Ecuadorian judge issued this Friday a preventive detention order against Walter Solís, former minister during the presidential term of Rafael Correa (2007-2017) and requested that the process of requesting extradition to Mexico begin, where according to his defense he has the condition of refugee.
Solís, who held the Transportation and Public Works portfolio, is one of the new six defendants in the case of reconstruction works after the strong earthquake of 2016, where the Prosecutor's Office found evidence of alleged embezzlement (embezzlement of public funds) in the Correa administration.
The former minister has two sentences for corruption pending in Ecuador, one of them in the Bribery case, referring to the irregular financing of the Correísta political party Alianza País, in which former President Correa was also convicted and disqualified.
The judge has released the other new defendants in the Reconstruction case on conditional release, with measures such as a ban on leaving the country and periodic appearances on the first working day of each week, including another former Minister of Transportation and Public Works, Boris Córdova, as reported by the Prosecutor's Office in a statement.
The magistrate also ordered the retention, immobilization and freezing of the accounts and investments that the defendants maintain in the national financial system, as well as the prohibition of alienating movable and immovable property owned by the newly linked parties.
In total, there are nine people charged in this case, including former vice president Jorge Glas, who on April 5 was arrested in an assault by police and military forces on the Mexican Embassy to comply with a preventive detention order against him, hours after the Mexican Government had granted him asylum, considering him politically persecuted.
The forced invasion of Mexico's diplomatic headquarters led this country to break relations with Ecuador and denounce it before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, considering that it has violated its sovereignty and international law.
However, for the Ecuadorian Government, it was Mexico that violated international treaties, since it maintains that the Asylum Convention prevents giving this benefit to people prosecuted by ordinary courts for common crimes.
This Friday, a court of the National Court of Justice of Ecuador ruled that Glas' detention was illegal and arbitrary, but kept him in prison since he has yet to finish serving an eight-year prison sentence for two convictions of illicit association and bribery issued in 2017 and 2020, respectively.
Glas served as president of the Reconstruction and Productive Reactivation Committee, in charge of prioritizing works for the reconstruction of the coastal provinces of Manabí and Esmeraldas, the most affected by the strong earthquake. Through this committee, 584 projects worth more than 367 million dollars were considered priorities.
However, based on its investigation, the Prosecutor's Office maintains that several of these works were allegedly unrelated to the objective of the reconstruction law and did not fit the context of the earthquake emergency. "In addition, it is presumed that this involved an abuse of public funds for the benefit of third parties, both natural and legal persons, who acted as contractors and inspectors of the signed contracts," said the Public Ministry.
"Those currently involved would have participated, with their decisions, in the initiation of contractual processes and requests for the allocation of funds for the execution of said projects, some of which were already known (by the date of the events), as they had been raised years before. after the earthquake occurred," he concluded.
