Pacheco is also proud of the inroads his government is making into poverty: he claims that his government will have reduced the percentage of people living in poverty by 2.1 percentage points this year. He says that the proportion of people living in poverty, according to figures from the Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos, has fallen this year from 20.6% to 18.5%.
This means, according to Pacheco, that 21,312 people have been pulled out of poverty in the past year. He has been in office for 17 months.
Pacheco is keen for the national assembly to approve a fiscal programme that will extend taxes and reduce evasion. He claimed that if congress failed to approve the package, the economic gains of this year could be chucked away.
Frauds
The government is becoming concerned by the scale of a banking fraud which has cheated pensioners (mostly foreigners who have settled in the country) out of US$160m in the last 18 months. This is more than three times the losses suffered when the Banco Anglo Costarricense collapsed in 1994. The government reckons that at least 6,350 foreign investors, some of whom had entrusted their life savings to these fraudsters, have lost money.
So far the authorities have made only one arrest: an Englishman, John Shimmel. Two other suspects, Luis Enrique Villalobos, who ran Ofinter, and a Cuban American, Luis Milanés, from Saving Limited, have fled. Another suspect, Roy Taylor, from The Vault, committed suicide last June when the police turned up at his office. Villalobos's brother, Osvaldo, was caught and is now in preventive custody. He is accused of accumulating US$100m in deposits with his brother in Ofinter, which also trades as The Brothers.
Officials said that the scandals were denting the international image of the country. They note that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation has become involved in at least one case and various private detectives from the US had taken an interest in what was happening. According to some US investigators, the country has become a centre for Mafia activity.
What the unlicensed companies did is tempt in the gullible and greedy with unrealistically high interest rates. Saving Limited, for example, was offering interest rates of between 3% and 5% a month on dollar deposits. Other companies persuaded clients to invest in unmissable opportunities that turned out to be frauds. Some of the depositors claim that the authorities have been too heavy-handed. One depositor claimed that he had always got the 4% monthly interest that The Brothers promised on his deposit. He claimed to have had the deposit with them for eight years and they had never missed a payment.
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