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The body of businessman Ruben Cherres was discovered on Friday March 31. At the heart of the scandal the great godfather (The great godfather, in French), he was suspected of being linked to the Albanian mafia and of being the right-hand man of Guillermo Lasso’s brother-in-law.
It is a very suspicious death that does not help the affairs of Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso, about to be judged politically by parliament. The Ecuadorian police had been looking for Ruben Cherres since January 21, but his assassins were more efficient and faster, explains our correspondent in Quito, Eric Samson. The body of the businessman was found in Punta Blanca, in the province of Santa Elena (west), with three other corpses, two men and a woman.
Ruben Cherres introduced himself as ” tanker even though his business was more related to real estate. Since 2014, he shared the shares of twelve companies with Dritan Gjika, an Albanian citizen living in the port of Guayaquil. According to the superintendence of Ecuadorian companies, a company control body, quoted by the media Plan V, at least two of these companies had not respected the rules of prevention of drug laundering and financing of terrorist activities. Since the late 1990s, Ruben Cherres had apparently had links with drug traffickers, but had always escaped justice.
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For some members of the opposition, his assassination aims to protect President Lasso before his impeachment trial on charges of corruption and offenses against state security. Because Ruben Cherres was at the heart of the “The Great Godfather” scandal, which erupted in mid-February with the journalistic investigation of the online media The mail on a network of corruption in the country’s public companies. Questioned by this media, Ruben Cherres had admitted to having links with the Albanian mafia, as suspected by the police. In its investigation, the Ecuadorian media also reported that Ruben Cherres was a man of confidence and a close friend of Danilo Carrera, the brother-in-law of Guillermo Lasso and that he was allegedly the operator of a network of corruption in public companies. from the country.
These revelations from La Posta led to opposition demands for a trial against the head of state. The opposition in Parliament considers that he had been warned of the existence of this device and that he had not acted to stop it. The head of state argued that the case for which he will be prosecuted took place between 2018 and 2020, when he was not president. However, he is criticized for not having intervened in time at the start of his mandate, even if he was aware of a contract detrimental to the Ecuadorian State.
