the Guatemalan PresidentAnd Alejandro GiamattiOn Wednesday, he denied the allegations of wrongdoing corruption originating in the Dominican Republic, which links him to the brother of former local president Danilo Medina (2012-2020), Alexis Medina.

“It is important to remember that criminal responsibility is individual, so President Giamatti separates himself from any accusation against third parties,” The government indicated when asked by reporters.

The Communications Secretariat of the President of Guatemala noted that Giamatti traveled to the Dominican Republic in 2019 as President-elect. “To meet the head of state of that nation,” Danilo Medina.

The same source pointed out that this visit in 2019 came from “a strategic work agenda and the natural dynamics of business, diplomatic and political relations typical of public positions.”

Giamatti’s Communications Secretariat added: “As part of this trip, on 1 November of that year he had a widely publicized multi-media meeting with then Dominican President Danilo Medina, who received him in his office.”

The Guatemalan government stressed that “a meeting was held at a later time with representatives of the two delegations,” noting that “during the then president-elect’s tour, Alejandro Giamatti He also visited other countries such as the United States, Mexico, Taiwan, Colombia, Spain, Costa Rica and Israel.

The accusations in the Dominican Republic

The Dominican Republic’s attorney general is investigating alleged links to Alexis Medina, who is in prison for the prosecution corruptionwith politicians from Guatemala, entre ellos Giammattei.

The alleged links appear in the Dominican Prosecutor’s Office’s judicial file against the city, which Effie gained access to on Wednesday, and which indicates that the brother of the former Dominican president leads an alleged network of corruption.

The file indicates that the city had lunch with Giamatti at the end of October 2019, three months before the Guatemalan president’s inauguration (January 2020), at a restaurant in Punta Cana, eastern Dominican Republic, with Interest in doing business Supposed to be illegal in Guatemala.

At the meeting, according to the 3,445-page indictment of 26 other people, Wonder Island Park managers, who Alexis Medina He has in Punta Cana with the former presidential candidate Guatemala Manuel Baldison, imprisoned in the United States for money laundering.

The report added that both of them “carried out numerous businesses related to the fuel sector, procurement in China and the acquisition of real estate in the Dominican Republic.”

Prosecutors accuse the city of directing a network that managed to raise 4,796 million Dominican pesos (more than $82 million) from public funds by obtaining millionaire contracts with various state institutions that exercised their influence during the Danilo Medina administration (2012-2020).

Alexis Medina “Aiming to repeat” this form of “illegal bidding” in Guatemala The accusation adds, “with the support of powerful political sectors” of that nation, who were identified through the investigation, but whose names were not disclosed in the files “for reasons of investigative strategy.”

In this sense, the document added, “international legal cooperation is required in order to investigate the scope of the repercussions on society” outside the national territory.

The Public Prosecutor’s Office asserts that the alleged network obtained illegal contracts with the state, taking advantage of “acts and omissions” on the part of Danilo Medina, although it has not yet brought charges against the former Dominican president.

Giammattei was investigated in Guatemala to corruption in july, allegedly meeting with Russian citizens to provide them with some port advantages, as detailed by Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Juan Francisco Sandoval on the 23rd of the same month, after his removal from the Public Prosecution Office by the entity’s Prosecutor General, Consuelo Porras.

Sandoval’s removal caused alarm in the international community and in the United States, which expressed disappointment at the attorney general’s departure and later in September sanctioned the chief prosecutor, Consuelo Porras, by canceling his visa and banning him from entering its territory. He accused her of “obstruction of justice” in high-impact cases.