- Click to share on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
- Click to share on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
- Click here to share on LinkedIn (Opens in a new window)
- Click to email a friend (Opens in a new window)
(CNN Spanish) - Former President Juan Carlos Varela lost control of the Panamanian Party amid the scandal of the leaks called "Varela Leaks". The Panamanian Party is the group that brought him to power between 2009 and 2014, and which he led with his brother José Luis Varela for 13 years.
This Sunday, in internal elections to choose, among other positions, the president of the new board of directors of the party, Varela's candidate, former Minister Mario Etchelecu, obtained 503 of the 1,327 valid votes.
The winner is José Isabel Blandón, former capital mayor and former presidential candidate in the elections of May this year. Among the seven candidates proposed, Blandón won 816 votes, with which he became the new president of the Panamanian Party until 2021.
- LEE: Panama's attorney waives amid scandal over “Varela leaks”
Since 2006, Juan Carlos Varela was in charge of the collective, and in 2011 he was reelected for the same position. But by winning the electoral elections in 2014 and being the president of Panama, in 2016 a new election of the board of directors is made, in which his brother José Luis Varela won as president of the party.
However, this Sunday the Extraordinary Convention of the group was made without the presence of Juan Carlos Varela.
Currently, the ex-president, along with his brother, is mired in a scandal over the recent leaks of more than 24 gigabytes of information from a supposedly lost cell phone, and whose content was posted on a portal named Varela Leaks.
In it you can read conversations via WhatsApp of the former president with senior officials of the government of Panama and other countries such as the United States and Venezuela, businessmen, journalists, among others, and in which it is possible to glimpse supposed traffic of influences and interference of the Executive in other organs of the State.
For example, that Varela along with her brother and the Attorney General of the Nation Kenya Porcell allegedly worked together with the Odebrecht company, after the construction company confessed corruption in several countries in the region, including Panama.
Before the scandal, on more than one occasion, through a statement, the former president has said that no cell phone was lost and that it is a violation of his privacy, in which the conversations were altered and manipulated, so that filed a complaint For his part, José Luis Varela told CNN that he accepts what his brother said.
Meanwhile, the prosecutor of the Nation Kenya Porcell publicly expressed her resignation from January 1, 2020 to allow an investigation, but said she had not read the Varela Leaks because she was committing a crime.
Currently, the official is investigated by the Attorney General of the Administration, and the origin of the leaks is investigated in the Public Ministry. So far there is no investigation against Juan Carlos Varela.
Complaints Filtration Juan Carlos Varela Policy