MADRID, 5 (EUROPA PRESS)
The Chilean lawyer Óscar Aitken used up to six companies in the British Virgin Islands to hide the assets of the dictator Augusto Pinochet, where payments were also received as a result of the sale of weapons, according to the information revealed by the Pandora Papers, which reveal how the office that He managed them and tried to disassociate himself when he met their true owner.
The companies were administered through the Panamanian law firm Alemán, Cordero, Galindo and Lee (Alcogal), which, according to the investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), asked Aitken to close or transfer them. upon learning that some of them were owned by the dictator.
“We have read in the newspaper ‘El Mercurio’ that you have accepted the fact that General Pinochet is the owner of some of these companies, which we were never previously informed of. We are not in a position to judge whether the patrimony of these companies was obtained or not illegally, but the mere fact that its possible owner is General Pinochet (who is a ‘politically exposed person’) is enough, according to our internal policies, for us to proceed to resign as Resident Agents of all the companies in which you appear as a correspondent “, picks up one of the emails addressed to the lawyer published in the Pandora Papers.
The alarms in Panama and in the law firm jumped when in July 2004 the United States Senate published a report in which it revealed that the autocrat had accounts in one of the country’s banks, information that prompted an investigation of the patrimony of Pinochet who led to reveal the existence of the ‘offshore’ in the British Virgin Islands, recalls CIPER, one of the Chilean media that has participated in the journalistic investigation.
The Pandora Papers reflect how Alcogal sent justifications to various entities to try to completely disassociate himself from the companies that managed Pinochet’s assets, especially after the uproar caused by the information in the United States.
Of the six companies, Belview was the most prolific, since it was through which the dictator carried out his real estate deals, through a subsidiary that his front man created in Santiago, buying several apartments and properties for a value of about 700 million dollars (about 603 million euros). On the other hand, Cornwall has been shown to be associated with the illegal sale of weapons.