The former deputy is one of those who benefited from the fragmentation of the 7-39050-000 farm located within that reserve in the northeastern province of Limón, as the politician himself confirmed in statements to that publication.
The property of that lot –the newspaper added- was bought by Álvarez Desanti in 2001, as part of the assets of the company Financiera Belén S.A., belonging to businessman Calixto Chaves and acquired by Financiera Brunca, chaired by the politician of the Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN).
The former candidate for the 2018 elections now appears as the owner of the land on the limits of the protected area, which became news due to an alleged illegal logging on a farm owned by a businessman named Pacheco Dent, who is being investigated for lending a recreation center to the country’s President.
“Our interest – alleged Ávarez de Santi – was the Belén credit portfolio, but when buying a company all the assets come with it, including several third-party properties, one of them in Manzanillo, awarded to the Belén Financial Company due to non-payment by a debtor of a mortgage loan.”
According to the former candidate, his company never negotiated or directly bought the property in Manzanillo, which only came as part of the assets of said Financial Company, “to put it in some way – he stressed – it came to us by chance.”
“From 2001 to date –he pointed out- we are its legitimate owners and we have not made any development on the property nor have we had any legal or administrative claim for the land, which is currently unused and maintained as a forest.”
On August 20, the authorities raided the headquarters of the National Institutes of Housing and Urban Planning and Tourism, for alleged ecological damage to the northeastern Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge, such as illegal logging and misuse of land.
These interventions –explains the director of the OIJ Rándall Zúñiga- are in different parts of the country, such as San José, Heredia and Limón and they are looking for possible acts of corruption linked to regulatory plans that report private benefits through a tourist exploitation that destroys wetlands through illegal logging. The investigation, the official said, was initiated by the Prosecutor’s Office for Environmental Crimes and for Probity, Transparency and Anti-Corruption and is related to the Coastal Regulatory Plan for the Talamanca area, where anomalies are presumed in the processing and approval of said program.
The Jairo Mora Sandoval Gandoca-Manzanillo Mixed National Wildlife Refuge, created by decree in 1986, is a protected area administered under the La Amistad Caribe Conservation Area of the National System of Conservation Areas.
Costa Rica is one of the countries with the greatest biodiversity in the world, concentrating around five percent of the planet’s species in a relatively small territory (51,100 square kilometers).
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