Attorney General Roberto Gurgel has done the unthinkable - he has opened an investigation into the allegations of financial impropriety levelled at the former president, Lula da Silva (2003-2010) by one of the convicted ringleaders of the mensalão, Marcos Valerio. The government led by Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, has mounted a damage-control campaign. Lula himself is contemptuous of Valerio’s claims that not only did he know about the congressional cash-for-votes bribery scheme, for which his former number two José Dirceu is facing a 10-year prison sentence, but that he himself profited from it, using some of the public cash siphoned…
The winds are changing in the Southern Cone as investors eye up Argentina’s massive shale gas deposits, with the unconventional sector likely to be up and running by 2015, potentially sooner than Brazil’s deep-water pre-salt oil sector. The US oil giant, Chevron, has inked a letter of intent with Argentina’s cash-strapped state oil company, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF), for the development of the massive ‘Vaca Muerta’ shale gas deposits in the Patagonian province of Neuquén. The ‘Vaca Muerta’ comprises some of the largest currently known shale reserves in the world outside of China and the US, with some 774 trillion…
PARAGUAY-ARGENTINA | Preparing for difficult Yacyretá negotiations. On 17 December Paraguay’s foreign minister, José Félix Fernández Estigarribia, said that the government of President Federico Franco is preparing to re-negotiate the Yacyretá bi-national treaty with Argentina which governs the eponymous hydroelectric dam shared by the two countries. After holding a meeting with the Paraguayan director at Yacyretá, Enrique Cáceres, Fernández Estigarribia pointed out that sections of the Yacyretá treaty are set to expire in March 2014 and that bilateral negotiations must begin in the coming months. He said that the Paraguayan government has already formed a commission tasked with preparing proposed…
“Completely inadmissible and illegal”. This was the response by the country’s main media group, Grupo Clarín, to the notification by the government of President Cristina Fernández that the group begins the process of transferring “excess” licenses in accordance with the anti-monopoly 2009 Media Law. The notification followed a 14 December ruling by a federal judge, Horacio Alfonso, which found the Media Law constitutional. This ruling followed fast on the heels of an acerbic attack by Fernández on the judiciary in relation to the case and, pointedly, her threat to carry out a profound overhaul of the judiciary for being out…