In the last 15 years, while Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo consolidated their dictatorship through tricks, repression and millionaire resources, their eight children established themselves as businessmen. The other path in parallel is that they served as prominent officials.
“Ravage capitalism” was not as bad as his father claimed in his speeches. They began a process of accumulating wealth since 2007 in the most absolute secrecy, one of the characteristics of the government leadership.
However, in 2021, a team of CONFIDENTIAL had access for the first time to more than 100 minutes of board of directors of a group of 22 companiesregistered in the name of 18 executives and five lawyers from the presidential consortium, which allowed the elaboration of a partial map of these businesses and the incursion into a chest of palace secrets.
The items found in the investigation were varied: interests in the media, construction, advertising and oil sectors. With an operation that followed the same pattern: take advantage of its state position, through contracts with institutions, or take advantage of Venezuelan cooperation resources, estimated at 5 billion dollars between 2007 and 2016, to make loans to their companies or acquire companies that allowed them to diversify their businesses.
The characters involved ended up being some well-known ones such as José María Enríquez Moncada and José Mojica Mejía, who appeared in the official deeds appearing as “partners” of Yadira Leets, the ex-wife of Rafael Ortega Murillo, the dictator’s eldest son. That tie was also close in other limited companies. The group of people involved was varied, but loyalty to the “presidential family” was a common characteristic of its members.
The documentation made it possible to identify, for example, the lawyer Reyna Anais del Socorro Araica López in that team of front men. Many revealing details were uncovered. Mayling Patricia Alegría Doña has a double life: she is the owner of a beauty salon and a front man at various gas stations; Eduardo Germán Morales Cuadra works as a publicist and appears just like the others on paper, moving from one company to another with great flexibility.
The series was published in February 2022. However, it all started with a source, whose identity we will protect, and thanks to whom we obtained the documentary information. That served to discover and then explain to the readers a whole system of corruption in Nicaragua. The delivery by the Chinese businessman Wang Jing, the same one of the failed project of the great interoceanic canal, of 30% of the shares of the Xinwei telephone company to the presidential circle was revealed and it is impossible to disassociate this action with the protection offered by Ortega in the face of public criticism .
It was also exposed how the state channel 6 is represented in institutional agreements by the company Negocios Publicitarios Internacionales, SA (NEPISA), controlled by Enríquez Moncada and Morales Cuadra. Another fraudulent business in which a State company ends up in the hands of a company related to the Ortega-Murillos, as happened with the Nicaraguan Petroleum Distributor (DNP), the network of gas stations that was managed by the ex-wife of Rafael Ortega Murillo.
Salaries: another key point of the report
We also accessed a 2018 Social Security database, which allowed us to cross-reference what was found with the information obtained from the Mercantile Registry documents. Another unprecedented event in a country where there has been no access to public information for years. This is how we documented that the Ortega Murillo circle did work in the companies and what their salaries were, a remarkable amount for one of the poorest countries in the region.
In that 2018, the Ortega Murillo clan received 67,500 dollars a month, which constitutes a part of their income in an opaque state, fueled by the absence of oversight, in which other sources helped corroborate the main findings of this detailed investigation. which until years ago was thought impossible.
On August 6, 2021, journalist Octavio Enríquez, co-author of the journalistic series and one of the members of the CONFIDENTIAL, sent an email to Rosario Murillo, spokeswoman for the regime and vice president, asking her about the findings. Two policemen came looking for him at his house to summon him to the Prosecutor’s Office in the only response they have given so far about the growth of his business presence and the people who help keep them in the shadows.
If the officers did not find him, it was because the journalist left Nicaragua in June, convinced that he could only continue carrying out his work from exile in the midst of an increasingly hostile and repressive environment against the independent press.
Police intimidation forced his family to move to Costa Rica and they finally became an exile family in December 2021, after months of anguish.
The jury of the “Javier Valdez” award awarded last November at the Latin American Conference of Investigative Journalism (COLPIN), the most important of the specialty in the region, third place to “Family businesses: the wealth of the Ortega Murillo” , highlighting the courage and quality of the research.
The journalistic series competed with 283 high-level works sent from the entire region, according to the Institute for Press and Society. Santiago O`Donnell, one of the members of the jury, said that when he read the work he knew that it was “an important piece of investigative journalism in the region.”
The journalism of CONFIDENTIAL He closed 2022 with that recognition, in a region with various threats to freedom of expression, committed to continuing to reveal what is hidden by power. Last year ended with 37 journalists murdered, the highest number since 1998, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which implies the description of a complex picture to continue practicing professionally.
The revelations of the investigation were analyzed by the former opposition deputy Enrique Sáenz in an interview conducted by our director Carlos Fernando Chamorro. In it, the emblematic case of the Nicaraguan Petroleum Distributor (DNP) was discussed, the network of gas stations that belonged to the State and ended up in private hands linked to the ruling family.
Also: How the public company DNP passed into the hands of the private group Ortega-Murillo
“DNP is one of the emblematic examples of how the family in power has appropriated the instruments of the State to accumulate personal wealth,” said Sáenz in his conversation, broadcast on the television program Esta Semana. Investigating power becomes a job where one rummages in the dark, thanks to the sources that continue to allow us to know these internalities to tell them to society. That more informants continue to carry the light.
