Fernandez Barrueco Busted...but why?
Quico says: On the day after Bolibourgeois operator extraordinaire Ricardo Fernández Barrueco got shuffled off to a prison cell at Disip – Venezuela’s secret police – the questions far outnumber the answers. It’s easy to guess that Fernández Barrueco – head of such bankruptrrific banks as Banco Confederado, BanPro and Banco Canarias – did something serious to displease his higher ups. Suspicions will fall most heavily on Infrastructure Minister Diosdado Cabello who, as far as we can tell (which isn’t very far at all), is very much the man behind the curtain on these matters.
Part of me wants to imagine Fernández Barrueco sharing a Disip cell with his little banking empire’s also imprisoned-without-trial former boss, Eligio Cedeño. Seriously, those banks are jinxed…
Yet beyond that broadest of outlines, there’s no real way to discern the power politics at play here. Chalk it up to the lethal combination between the regime’s opacity, its willingness to silence the media, and the pathetic disinterest that most Venezuelan media have always shown towards investigative journalism in general. Even if somebody in the Venezuelan media had the capacity and the budget you’d need to do justice to the story of Fernández Barrueco’s downfall, nobody would dare to.
So no, I don’t really know why he went to jail. If you do: dish!
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