Jose Cabezas
Guatemalan police on Friday arrested 17 suspects as part of a probe into money laundering and illegal election financing that has reportedly ensnared a subsidiary of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim’s America Movil. Former communications minister Alejandro Sinibaldi, a fugitive since last summer, has been accused of masterminding the scheme with a web of shell companies to funnel out bribe money. The U.N.-backed International Commission Against Impunity (CICIG) in Guatemala says some of the illicit funds were earmarked to finance the right-wing Patriot Party of Otto Perez, the former president who continues to wield power from behind bars after his arrest on corruption charges in 2015. Ivan Velasquez, the head of the CICIG, said some payments in Sinibaldi’s account were traced back to Telecomunicaciones de Guatemala S.A. (Telgua), a subsidiary of Slim’s America Movil. America Movil, a telecommunications giant and one of the biggest corporations in the world, has yet to comment on the allegations.