Peruvian President Alan Garcia was mulling a Cabinet shake-up late on Thursday after all of his ministers offered to resign in a widening corruption scandal over oil concessions.
The president has faced calls from opposition leaders to shuffle his Cabinet since audio tapes emerged this week linking members of his APRA party to a plan to steer lucrative petroleum contracts to favored bidders in exchange for bribes.
Garcia, a staunch supporter of free-markets and foreign investment, has yet to say which ministers he will let go or keep.
The Cabinet members voluntarily offered up their positions with “an absolutely clean and calm conscience,” Prime Minister Jorge del Castillo said on Thursday after the ministers arrived together at the government palace. “We have offered our posts to the president and under no circumstances will we get in the way of the country’s growth.”
Del Castillo, Garcia’s right-hand man, was mentioned in the taped conversations as someone who would provide favors in a plan to rig auctions of oil and gas concessions. Del Castillo also had lengthy meetings with APRA party members who were working as lobbyists and involved in the auctions, but he has denied wrongdoing.
The former mines and energy minister, Juan Valdivia, already has been forced to quit, along with two other energy officials.
Finance Minister Luis Valdivieso, a former IMF official who recently joined Garcia’s administration, is expected to stay on.
Peru’s Congress has voted to investigate all oil and gas concessions granted since 2006 and will scrutinize dozens of contracts signed between Peru and foreign oil companies for signs of irregularities in the country’s growing petroleum sector.
Garcia is a former leftist whose first term as president in the 1980s ended in economic disaster. He has since become a champion of mainstream economic policies and was elected to lead Peru for a second time in 2006.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion