Senator Jorge Querey, president of the Bicameral Commission on money laundering, commented that the same drug trafficking or cigarette smuggling route is also used to move money from organized crime in small planes, which arrive in the country from the north.
The senator of the Guasú Front bench, Jorge Querey, chairs the Bicameral Investigation Commission (CBI) on money laundering and related crimes. Since its installation, the parliamentary body seeks to collect and process the greatest amount of information regarding money laundering and criminal activities related to the practice in order to prepare a report that allows the political class to understand what is happening in Paraguay and legislate. based on this x-ray.
“Each sentence that is put in that report must have the support of a document or information provided by one of the people or institutions that have gone to inform us at the CBI meetings,” he said.
Unlike the context in which it investigated the Messer Case, the CBI found itself in a very tense environment due to “political crossroads,” said Querey.
RESEARCH
The investigative work of the CBI has focused, for example, on the illicit trafficking of cigarettes and the route used by intermediary companies to market this product to Brazil, explained Querey.
“I am not referring only to Tabesa, the illicit traffic of cigarettes is 80% of the national production. This is certified, because exports are only 13% and domestic consumption amounts to 9%. They are categorical figures. The rest of those intermediary companies acquire them and smuggle them in,” he stated.
One of the results of the investigation was to determine that the same route used by criminal organizations to move narcotics or contraband cigarettes is also used to move the money from these illicit activities on planes, which enter the country through the north, Querey said.
“The money also comes by small planes to the north. We have already detected that route, we are one of the few countries that with barrier measures can correct this situation”, he analyzed.
In this sense, the senator for the Guasú Front lamented that initiatives such as the purchase of primary radars to control the ports or the law to shoot down planes considered “suspicious” never prosper.
“They are always finding the way to mesh the processes, which are even approved in some budgets. However, they are stuck there in internal affairs, ”he said.
Thus, Querey added that “if we have a primary radar or two or three planes with the capacity to intervene in these irregular flights or an artery that is guarding our limits on the Paraguay River, we are cutting the logistics chain of criminal organizations,” he emphasized. .
In addition to cutting the logistics chain, preventing money laundering is a fundamental task to ward off organized crime, explained the senator. “That’s why I’m a little tired of them using the issue of bank secrecy as an excuse. Institutions like BCP have to have controls”, he concluded.
