PERU: Prosecutors Investigate Wiretapping Operation

[nosmokes]

Too bad we can't do as much as Peru, huh?
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original-ips

PERU: Prosecutors Investigate Wiretapping Operation

By Ángel Páez

LIMA, Oct 30 (IPS) - Prosecutors in Peru are investigating illegal wiretapping allegedly committed by private security companies or police and military intelligence bodies.

Attorney General Gladys Echaíz put the inquiry in the hands of prosecutor Walter Milla Tuesday, three weeks after the media broadcast telephone conversations between the then director of the state agency Perupetro, Alberto Químper, and Rómulo León, a local representative of the Norwegian oil company Discover Petroleum.

The tapes, dubbed "petroaudios", triggered a major scandal that led the entire cabinet to step down on Oct. 10, although 10 of the 17 ministers were later reinstated. One of the cabinet members who were replaced was then prime minister Jorge del Castillo.

The recordings revealed an apparent conspiracy between Alan García administration officials and Discover Petroleum representatives to grant the company five oil contracts. But the evidence was obtained by a wiretapping operation, whose perpetrators and aims remain unknown.

In Peru telephones can only be bugged with specific authorisation from judicial authorities in investigations on drug trafficking, terrorism, kidnapping or extortion, and possession of wiretapping equipment is a crime.

Former prime minister del Castillo had met several times with a Discover Petroleum lobbyist and with León, a former cabinet minister and legislator for the governing APRA party.

After 14 former and active officials and others implicated in the corruption scandal were prosecuted on Oct. 21, Echaíz found grounds to investigate the broad wiretapping operation that brought the scandal to light, which eavesdropped on the telephone conversations of government officials, lawyers and local and foreign businesspersons for eight months.

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