Genaro García Luna, Felipe Calderón’s Secretary of the Interior, amassed a fortune of more than 745 billion dollars; half of it in the government of Enrique Peña Nieto.
According to an investigation by the newspaper El País, from 2009 to 2018, the former official, who is being prosecuted in the United States, diverted resources through 30 simulated contracts.
The money came from the Federal Police, the Ministry of the Interior and the Mexico City Prosecutor’s Officeaccording to the expansion of the civil lawsuit filed by the Mexican government in the United States to recover the assets.
In 2001, the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) filed the first lawsuit before a Florida court to dispute the property and assets of García Luna.
(PHOTO: Trial. García Luna is prosecuted in a federal court in New York)
Judgment. García Luna is prosecuted in a federal court in New York for having helped the Sinaloa Cartel to traffic drugs to the United States.
Last Tuesday, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador reported that they seek to recover 700 million dollars from the illicit assets of the former official.
According to court documents, obtained by El País and presented by Mexico before the Eleventh Judicial Circuit Court of Miami Dade County, Florida, The former official’s fortune amounts to 745.4 million dollars.
DESPITE A CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT, CONTINUED LOOTING THE COffers
The diversions orchestrated by García Luna from the Segob began during the six-year term of Felipe Calderón, from 2009 to 2012, but continued with Peña Nieto who disappeared to the Secretary of Security, but his functions passed to the Interior.
Only more than half of the fortune, 427.6 million dollars, was looted from the coffers of the Ministry of the Interior from 2013 to 2018in the EPN period.
Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, today a senator, was the Secretary of the Interior.
According to information from El País, the simulated contracts were initially awarded to García Luna’s proxies from the Cisen and from the Directorate for Control of Sentenced in Liberty of the Decentralized Administrative Body for Prevention and Social Readaptation (OADPRS).
Both the Cisen, used by the EPN government as an intelligence and espionage body, and the administration of federal prisons were under the command of Osorio Chong.
The contracts with which he looted the Segob were for the alleged purchase of “special communication equipment”, the creation of a “national security platform”, the purchase of technology for prisons and a generic “expansion of equipment”.
THEFT IN THE CAPITAL PROSECUTOR’S OFFICE
In addition to Segob, García Luna also diverted resources from the then Attorney General’s Office, today the capital’s Prosecutor’s Office, led by Edmundo Garrido Osorio and with Miguel Ángel Mancera as head of government.
With a single contract dated October 2017, he looted 1.5 million dollars.
ILLEGAL RECRUITMENT SCHEME
From 2009 to 2012, while he was working in the SSP, García Luna diverted 316.6 million dollars from the Federal Police and the OADPRS, according to information provided by the FIU.
According to the agency’s first lawsuit filed in Florida, the extraction was through an “illegal government contracting scheme.”
Resources that went to the accounts of the ex-secretary’s companies or those of his lenders.
The new lawsuit was filed by the FIU on October 31, 2022.
RESOURCES TRIANGULATED
The diverted resources ended up in the accounts of four García Luna companies: GLAC Security Consulting, Nunvav Inc., Nunvav Technologies Y Nice Systems LTD. But in the expansion of the lawsuit there are 46 companies accused for their alleged participation in the diversion scheme.
The first of them in the name of the former head of the SSP, while Nunvav Inc. and Nunvav Technologies, based in Panama, is owned by businessmen Mauricio Samuel Weinberg López, Jonathan Alexis Weinberg Pinto and Natan Wancier Taub, the three partners and front men by Garcia Luna.
In the case of Nice Systems LTD, it is an Israeli company that allegedly paid bribes to the official and the Weimbergs.
According to the data provided by the FIU, they triangulated the resources, first to bank accounts in Barbados, then to the United States and finally to Israel.
According to the demand made by the Mexican government, the accomplices are: Linda Cristina Pereyra Gálvez, wife of García Luna; José Francisco Niembro González, former Undersecretary of Information Technologies of the Ministry of Security, and his wife, Martha Virginia Nieto Guerrero.
Also featured is Sylvia Donna Pinto, wife of Samuel Weinberg.
