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Bolivia’s former interim president arrested over 2019 coup
13 Mar, 2021 07:04
FILE PHOTO. Bolivia's interim President Jeanine Anez in August 2020. ©REUTERS / David Mercado
Jeanine Anez, who seized power in Bolivia as an interim president after the November 2019 ousting of then-president Evo Morales, has been arrested on suspicion of sedition, the new government has announced.
Anez's arrest warrant was issued by a court on Friday and was executed on Saturday morning, Minister of Government Carlos del Castillo announced on Twitter. He hailed the development as a step forward in giving the Bolivian people the justice they deserve.
Bolivian media showed images of the politician being taken into custody. Anez and other members of her government have been accused of sedition, terrorism and conspiracy over the way they took and held on to power.
Meanwhile, Anez denounced the Bolivian government, saying her arrest was “abuse and political persecution”, denying that a coup ever happened in the country.
A number of police officers were spotted around Anez’s home in the city of Trinidad, northeast of La Paz, on Friday after the news of her imminent arrest broke.
Anez served as the leader of Bolivia after violent mass protests in 2019 forced Morales to resign and flee the country. The uprising was triggered by allegations of election fraud, which were later revealed to be largely unsubstantiated.
The Anez government deployed the military against Morales’ supporters, who staged counter-protests, and it temporarily gave the troops immunity from prosecution for their actions as they quelled the dissent.
Morales was forced to go into exile after the Bolivian security forces sided with his opponents, with Anez’s 'interim' conservative government later taking power in the South American country. However, she withdrew her candidacy from the next election in 2020 one day after polls showed the pro-Morales candidate in the lead.
The Movement for Socialism (MAS), Morales’ political party, made a comeback by winning the November 2020 general election and securing the presidency for Luis Arce.
French ex-president Sarkozy on trial over ‘illegal financing’ of 2012 campaign,
two weeks after corruption conviction
17 Mar, 2021 16:34
Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has gone on trial over allegations of illicit financing of his failed 2012 re-election bid. The new trial comes just two weeks after he was convicted for influence peddling and corruption.
The hearings kicked off in a Paris court on Wednesday in the ex-leader’s absence.
The case, widely known in France as the Bygmalion affair, stems from allegations of illicit funding of Sarkozy’s failed presidential campaign in 2012. The former president is accused of massive overspending with the help of the now-defunct Bygmalion PR agency.
According to prosecutors, the campaign cost ballooned to nearly double the allowed limit of €22.5 million ($26.7 million) at the time, reaching at least €42.8 million (some $51 million).
The costs of the campaign got out of control after right-winger Sarkozy met an unexpectedly strong challenge from his socialist rival Francois Hollande. Sarkozy held massive, US-style rallies. However, these failed to help him to secure a victory. To conceal the overspending, Sarkozy along with his associates and Bygmalion allegedly conspired to hide the true costs within an elaborate system of fake invoices.
The former president has consistently denied the accusations against him, insisting that the case was a result of a grudge held by France’s judiciary, which he clashed with during his time in office. Unlike his co-defendants, Sarkozy is not charged with fraud but with a lesser offense of illegal campaign financing. If convicted, the ex-president may face up to a year in jail and a fine.
The new trial comes two weeks after Sarkozy was convicted in a separate corruption case. He was found guilty of graft and influence peddling, receiving one year in jail and two years suspended, becoming the first French leader to get jail time since WWII.
Still, the ex-president is unlikely to get locked up in an actual prison as he is expected to serve his conviction at home, fitted with a tracking bracelet.
German govt spent over $2 BILLION of taxpayers’ money to pay pharmacies for ‘overpriced’ face masks – reports
19 Mar, 2021 06:28
A campaign by the German Health Ministry to supply the most vulnerable with free face masks amid the Covid-19 pandemic risks turning into a scandal amid reports that the officials vastly overpaid pharmacies.
In December 2020, every German over 60 as well as people with pre-existing health conditions were entitled to receive three FFP2 masks at any pharmacy free of charge, courtesy of the German Health Ministry, and personally of Minister Jens Spahn. The plan was to provide relief to the most vulnerable members of society ahead of the Christmas holidays.
But what seemed to be a generous gesture by the government is about to backfire, as the German media has found out just how much taxpayer money Health Ministry officials spent on the campaign.
According to a joint investigation by German broadcasters WDR and NDR, as well as the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, the entire affair cost €2.5 billion ($2.98 billion). The issue appears to be that, instead of just buying masks and distributing them among the targeted population groups, the ministry devised a rather complicated scheme involving compensation to individual pharmacies that were tasked with actually distributing the masks.
Under this plan, which was developed in the autumn, the government assumed that a total of 27.3 million people would be eligible for free masks. Officials then estimated the cost of the masks, assuming they would pay €6 for each one, and simply transferred the entire amount of €491 million to the German pharmacists’ association to cover the cost of the first three masks per person.
The association then distributed the money among the individual pharmacies. Each pharmacy received fixed compensation of €25,000 on average regardless of how many masks it actually distributed.
What is particularly puzzling is that for each mask, the ministry paid roughly six times more than the market price, as the pharmacists interviewed by the media said they planned to sell the masks at around €1 each. “We earned absolutely stupid money,” Berlin pharmacist Detlef Glass told the journalists.
Some politicians say the ministry could just as easily have bought enough masks to supply every single person in Germany with that amount of money. “It would probably have been easier to send masks to all people,” German MP Karl Lauterbach said, adding that “it would hardly be any more expensive.”
In fact, some German officials did just that. In February, the German city of Bremen decided to supply all 600,000 of its residents aged 15 or older with five masks each within two weeks at a cost of €1 per mask. The city was about to spend €3 million on this campaign.
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