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Seat of the British Prime Minister: 10 Downing Street
Photo: ADRIAN DENNIS / AFP
A bribery scandal in the United States is spreading widely: At the beginning of August 2022, investigators from the US federal police FBI arrested the former governor of the US territory of Puerto Rico: Wanda Vázquez Garced had left office in January 2021.
She is accused of accepting $300,000 from a shady banker in hopes of getting the head of the local banking regulator fired in return.
The banker's name is Julio Herrera Velutini, he is from Venezuela and is accused by US authorities of conspiracy, bribery and fraud.
Velutini himself pleaded not guilty to the charges earlier this month, according to a report in the Financial Times.
According to a report by London's Sunday Times, the case is also spreading beyond the United States.
According to information from the newspaper, Mark Fullbrook, chief of staff to the new British Prime Minister Liz Truss, is in contact with the investigators.
The accused banker is a Tory donor
Before joining Truss, Fullbrook worked at C|T Group, a political lobbying firm.
In the US proceedings, he only appears as a witness and works "fully and voluntarily with the US authorities," Fullbrook said in a statement on the process.
According to media reports, the banker Julio Herrera Velutini was a customer of the C|T Group.
According to the Sunday Times, he also has the company to process payments.
At that time, Fullbrook also worked for the company.
Fullbrook and Herrera had dealings with each other in the field of opinion research.
However, at no point did he “work for the governor or her campaign and did not submit any research results to her”.
Fullbrook had worked for the company from 2010 to May 2022.
In the meantime he was an adviser to Boris Johnsons.
Among his US clients was Newt Gingrich, a hard-liner Republican.
The banker Herrera Velutini, on the other hand, was a major donor to the British Conservatives in the past: according to the Financial Times, he transferred a total of half a million pounds to the Tories in recent years.
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