Just five days after the Pandora Papers were circulated in Honduras, the National Congress convened to amend the Money Laundering Law, despite protests by opposition legislators.
Yaudet Burbara Canahuati, businessperson and popular Honduran legislator who is running for re-election for his fourth term, did not declare his assets to the Court of Accounts in 2010, as he is obliged to. It was not possible to establish if he declared the funds he had in the British Virgin Islands of the offshore company he managed there since 2015. Although the law prohibits it, his family’s hotel has signed several contracts with the state.
After selling equipment to Social Security for three times its value, according to the Attorney General’s Office, businessperson Fauzi Rishmawy created multiple companies in tax havens. Equipos Industriales, Rishmawy’s Honduran company, continues to be a state contractor and is one of the suppliers of the Honduran Energy Company (EEH), which manages the bills and distribution of energy in the country.
During the trial that ended in a two-year prison sentence in the United States for attempting to do business with drug traffickers, it was revealed that former Honduran minister Yankel Rosenthal Coello had three offshore companies. This journalistic investigation found that he actually had six other companies in tax havens.
An analysis of thousands of documents from the Pandora Papers has revealed that the former politician and cattle rancher owned three shell companies in Panama, and that his wife, Rosa Elena Bonilla, managed an offshore company while she was first lady. Lobo’s son and a former right-hand man both sought to create companies in tax havens. Adding to their woes, the former president and his wife were both named on the Engel List, and Bonilla is currently facing a corruption trial.
Current mayor of Tegucigalpa and popular presidential candidate Nasry Asfura, and former mayor and current vice-president of Honduras Ricardo Álvarez, managed offshore companies in Panama while in office. The revelation is particularly important considering they have both been investigated for alleged embezzlement. So far neither of them has offered explanations for the offshores.
A little over six months after the United States Congress passed the United States-Northern Triangle Enhanced Engagement Act (HR-2615), the U.S. State Department published a
The six Honduran officials named in the report are current National Party congressional representatives. Five of these had been previously implicated in the MACCIH-UFECIC Arca Abierta (Open Vault) investigation, including Oscar Nájera, a congressional representative sanctioned by the United States and the United Kingdom for his involvement in high-level corruption.
The pandemic and two hurricanes this year added to the heavy burden that Honduran nurses already bear. Together, they have learned to cope and confront the virus, the floods and long-standing evils: the plundering of the health system, unequal working conditions, violence, and machismo.
An environmental conflict marked by violence is raging in Guapinol, Honduras, where local inhabitants are resisting an iron oxide mine in a national park. This cross-border journalism alliance* has uncovered that Nucor Corporation, the chief steel producer in the United States, was a powerful hidden partner behind the mining project.
By Jennifer Avila/ Contracorriente Illustration by Paola Nirta from a photograph of Juan López / Agenda Propia Photos by Martín Cálix and Fernando Silva /
I am on the other side of the border that around seven thousand Hondurans are trying to cross. I am writing about that exodus of
Photo: Gorge ICE Resistance I am thousands of kilometers away on a Witness for Peace* tour in the northwest Pacific of the United States. In
Text by: Jennifer Avila Photography: Hansel Brooks, victim in the Ahuas massacre 2012. By: Martín Cálix Yesterday, a tribunal in La Ceiba absolved the only
After four days of traveling through the northern and central regions of Honduras, the U.S. Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison tells us that he has listened
By: Jennifer Avila Honduras and its eternal tragedy. Today all of us who live in this country lost Gustavo Moreno, a human being with an
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