THE former head of Mexico’s national oil firm has denied new claims he took millions in bribes through a Scottish ghost company.
Emilio Lozoya Austin, the former chief executive of Pemex, has already been accused of funnelling payments from a Brazilian construction giant through an Edinburgh-based limited partnership or SLP.
Now the official - close to outgoing Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto - has dismissed claims he received millions more from a steel concern through the same Scottish firm, an entirely opaque entity called Grangemouth Trading.
The new allegations against Mr Lozoya are just the latest to surface thanks to Brazil’s giant continent-wide investigation in to the bribery machinery of construction giant Odebrecht.
Court documents in Brazil have named Grangemouth Trading as one of a number of Scottish and other offshore firms used by Odebrecht to allegedly launder kickbacks to officials across Latin America in return for lucrative public contracts.
Odebrecht officials, as part of a plea-bargain process, have also said they paid Mr Lozoya, who was part of the 2012 campaign to get Peña Nieto elected.
Speaking through his lawyer, Mr Lozoya suggested claims he had accepted bribes were “defamatory”. His solicitor in a statement to Mexican investigative journalists said Odebrecht executives were “lying”.
Odebrecht, court documents suggest, allegedly paid Mr Lozoya through Grangemouth Trading in return for a contract to build an oil refinery.
The new allegations are that a steel giant called Altos Hornos de Mexico paid the same SLP some $3.7m after it sold a fertilizer plant to Mr Lazoya’s Pemex. Mr Lazoya’s lawyer said the executive “emphatically denied” having received any money from Altos Hornos.
The fertilizer plant was judged to be near worthless “scrap” by Mexico’s national audit office after the purchase. Pemex paid Altos Hornos some $270m for the factory in 2013 and was supposed to invest another $200m in renovations.
The former Edinburgh address of the SLP at the centre of the latest Mexican allegations
Five years later and the factory has only just started test production and the bill for its purchase and reconditioning, according to Mexico’s financial daily, El Economista, has hit three quarters of a billion dollars. One commentator quoted in the paper suggested Pemex had paid the “price of gold for a rusty plant”.
The new allegations were exposed by a team of investigative reporters at Mexico’s Quinto Elemento Lab, citing evidence from documents thrown up by the Car Wash investigation in to Odebrecht.
⚡¿Qué tienen en común Emilio Lozoya, #Odebrecht y Altos Hornos de México?⚡#ExtrañasTransferencias
— Quinto Elemento Lab (@quintoelab) August 20, 2018
La nueva investigación de Quinto Elemento Lab y la Red de Investigaciones Periodísticas Estructuradashttps://t.co/sEMDO31bpI pic.twitter.com/AqUkzUvx8O
Quinto Elemento Lab tweeted a short video of documents
The Brazilian firm has admitted paying some $800m in bribes to officials and major politicians.
As The Herald revealed earlier this year Grangemouth Trading is one of a number of Scottish firms named as part of the complex offshore network allegedly used to launder kickbacks. The firm is now registered in Kent, England, but previously gave an address next to the Church of Scotland’s Edinburgh HQ.
Altos Hornos de Mexico later on Monday told the Reuters news agency that it had made payments to Grangemouth Trading, but that these were for advice on a steelworks expansion.
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