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Peruvian Cabinet resigns en masse over oil scandal

Peruvian President Alan Garcia accepted on Friday the resignation of his entire 13-member Cabinet, in a bid to avert an opposition censure resolution in Congress over an oil-industry kickback scandal.

“The president has accepted our resignations presented to him on Thursday and will proceed to reshuffle the Cabinet,” outgoing prime minister Jorge del Castillo told reporters at government headquarters.

The kickback scandal has been roiling since last Sunday when nine audio tapes were leaked to news media covering backroom negotiations between government officials, a former congressman and a top oil baron, in a bid-rigging scheme to have Norway’s Discover Petroleum win five oil exploration concessions last month.

The outrage over the alleged kickback scheme fueled a media and opposition campaign to drive Garcia’s government out of office, with former presidential candidate Lourdes Flores insisting that any delay in the resignations “will make matters worse.”

Leftist National Party leader Ollanta Humala said the case pointed to “serious responsibility on the part of the entire Cabinet.”

Opposition lawmakers had scheduled a vote on a censure resolution against del Castillo for Tuesday.

The political crisis coincides with Garcia’s very low, 20 percent approval rating in opinion polls. Garcia is mid-way through his second five-year term in office, which ends in 2011, after serving as president from 1985 to 1990.

One of the reasons behind the popularity slump, according to the opposition, was Garcia’s insistence in keeping del Castillo at the government’s helm.

Garcia, surrounded by the outgoing Cabinet, blamed the resignation of his Cabinet to “the political game, in which strategy, passion and appetites conspire to blow any problem out of proportion.”

“The Cabinet of ministers headed by Jorge del Castillo are leaving with their heads high,” he said.

Implicated in the kickback scandal are Romulo Leon, a former lawmaker and Cabinet minister in Garcia’s first administration, who is currently at large, and Alberto Quimper, a former executive with PetroPeru, the state-run oil company, who is in jail.

A Discover Petroleum representative, Fortunato Canaan, from the Dominican Republic, was allegedly the money man who provided Leon with the means to buy the backing of several government officials in the bid-rigging scam, according to published excerpts of the audio tapes.

Canaan, whom the Peru21 newspaper recently branded a “Caribbean pirate masquerading as an investor,” even met with del Castillo and Garcia at the president’s office in April, published reports said.
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