Mexico's President Is in Hot Water Over Property Dealings - and the Backlash Is Fierce Christopher Woody - Business Insider
go to original August 18, 2016

Ocean Club Tower One, center, in Key Biscayne, Florida (Google Maps)

Last week, The Guardian reported that Angelica Rivera, the wife of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, had used an apartment in Florida owned by a Mexican businessman who also paid the property-tax bill on her own adjacent apartment.

The backlash for the controversy, which isn't the first conflict-of-interest scandal involving the current Mexican president, has already reached a high pitch.

Members of two of Mexico's major political parties, the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, and the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, have called for an investigation into the first lady's apartment, a unit in Ocean Tower One, in an upscale gated community in Key Biscayne, Florida.

Rivera purchased her apartment in 2005, and it is located a floor below the apartment purchased several years later by Ricardo Pierdant, who knows the president and owns Grupo Pierdant, a Mexican firm that is a potential bidder on contracts to manage the country's ports.

Legislators from PAN have requested that federal auditors and the country's comptroller's office look into whether businesses owned by Pierdant have worked with the federal government in the past.

The Mexican public has also joined in. A petition on Change.org with more than 86,000 signatures — titled "The Other White House," in reference to a previous property controversy involving the first family — calls for the anticorruption prosecutor's office to investigate Rivera.

Other observers have noted that the scandal again calls attention to the poor way Mexican politicians handle conflicts of interest.

Read the rest at Business Insider

Related: Mexico Corruption: Peña Nieto and His Generous "Friends" (Mexico Voices)

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