分类： politics

A bitter power struggle for the leadership of the OWOS union linked to Dutch public transport provider EBS is intensifying just weeks ahead of the September 10 leadership election, with incumbent chair Marciano Hellings launching an appeal after a court rejected his bid to secure equal campaign conditions against his rivals. Two major slates of candidates are competing to take control of the union’s governing board, alongside one independent candidate, turning the pre-election period into a high-stakes conflict over fair access to resources and work sites.

In a landmark ruling that marks one of the biggest corruption cases in modern Ecuadorian history, a national court in Quito has found former president Lenin Moreno guilty of bribery linked to widespread graft surrounding the construction of Ecuador’s largest hydropower facility, the Coca Codo Sinclair project.

The 73-year-old former head of state has been sentenced to five years in prison, and handed a lifelong ban from holding any public office in the country. The case centers on allegations of systemic fraud and bribery connected to the 1,500-megawatt hydroelectric plant, which entered commercial operation in 2016 but has been plagued by persistent technical issues and corruption accusations from its early development stages.

Prosecutors launched the formal investigation into the project in March 2023, uncovering alleged ties between Moreno, his immediate and extended family, local business partners, and Chinese commercial entities linked to the project. Presiding judge Manuel Cabrera confirmed that the evidence presented in court fully supported the bribery charges brought against the former president. According to court documents, China’s state-owned engineering firm Sinohydro paid approximately $76.1 million in bribes between 2009 and 2018, routed through a network of fake consultancy contracts to conceal the illegal payments.

In addition to Moreno’s conviction, multiple members of his family have also been found guilty in the scheme. His wife Rocio Gonzalez Navas, his daughter, two brothers, and the brothers’ spouses all received two-and-a-half year prison sentences. The court also sentenced Cai Runguo, the former Chinese ambassador to Ecuador, to five years in prison in absentia over his alleged role in the corruption network.

Investigators traced the illegal funds through a complex web of offshore bank accounts and shell companies registered in tax havens before the money reached Moreno and his family members. Court records show Moreno received more than $1 million in illicit payments during his tenure as Ecuador’s vice president between 2007 and 2013, a period when the Coca Codo Sinclair project was being negotiated and finalized.

Moreno has forcefully denied all allegations against him throughout the legal process. During his trial, he argued that he was never involved in signing or overseeing the project’s contracts, and claimed responsibility for the corruption lies with other officials who handled the contract negotiations and solicited bribes. Moreno, who served as Ecuador’s president from 2017 to 2021, voluntarily returned to Ecuador from Paraguay ahead of his trial to face the judicial process.

The Coca Codo Sinclair project is a strategic infrastructure asset for Ecuador’s national energy supply, and was developed with major loan financing from Chinese institutions. For years, it has been overshadowed by both costly technical malfunctions and persistent corruption claims. The high-profile conviction of a former president highlights growing global scrutiny of corruption risks associated with large-scale infrastructure development projects across Latin America, many of which involve significant foreign investment and partnership.

During parliamentary debate on Suriname’s General Tax Law, Ronny Asabina, leader of the BEP political faction, has publicly called for the immediate elimination of the 1 million Surinamese dollar (SRD) annual turnover VAT threshold, arguing that the existing regulation creates widespread opportunities for tax avoidance and fosters an environment conducive to systemic corruption.

Under current Surinamese tax rules, businesses with annual turnover falling below the 1 million SRD threshold are exempt from the same strict VAT reporting and payment obligations that apply to firms exceeding the limit. Asabina told the National Assembly that this two-tier system is widely exploited by unethical business owners, who deliberately structure their operations or falsify administrative records to keep their reported turnover below the cutoff, allowing them to skip out on VAT obligations entirely. He specifically called out the supermarket sector, casting doubt on the credibility of claims that dozens of operators in the industry actually generate less than 1 million SRD in annual turnover.

Critically, Asabina rejected the common counterargument that eliminating the threshold would overburden the Suriname Tax Administration, which reportedly faces staffing shortages that would leave it unable to oversee a vastly expanded pool of VAT-registered businesses. Reports indicate tax officials have previously floated raising the threshold to reduce administrative workload, a proposal Asabina dismissed outright. If expanding oversight requires hiring additional tax personnel and investing in new infrastructure, he argues, the state must prioritize that investment. Shortages in enforcement capacity, he emphasized, are never a justifiable reason to preserve a regulation that enables widespread abuse of the tax system.

Asabina’s criticism of the VAT threshold is part of a broader push to strengthen Suriname’s tax administration and crack down on non-compliance. He argues that tax system reform must include a full review of all existing rules that create opportunities for manipulation, and is calling on the government to launch a formal review of whether full elimination of the 1 million SRD threshold is feasible. He has also pressed the government to clarify its official position: will it keep the current threshold, raise it, or move to abolish it entirely?

A core part of Asabina’s broader reform agenda is expanding the use of digital tools to track taxpayers and financial flows. Suriname has already introduced online filing and payment systems for VAT, payroll tax and income tax, but Asabina is demanding transparency around the actual outcomes of this digital shift. He wants clear data on how many taxpayers have transitioned to online filing, and whether digitalization has actually led to higher or more efficient tax collection.

He also called for improved cross-agency information sharing between the tax administration and other government bodies, arguing that integrating data from different public datasets would allow officials to identify and act on tax evasion far more quickly. Importantly, Asabina stressed that his push for stricter enforcement does not mean higher tax burdens for ordinary citizens and compliant businesses. Instead, his goal is a fairer distribution of tax obligations, and a dramatic increase in the likelihood that tax avoiders and evaders are caught and held accountable.

Asabina concluded that the new General Tax Law can help advance these goals by granting the tax administration expanded authority for oversight, data collection and enforcement. For these new powers to be effective, however, he added, the tax authority must be properly resourced with sufficient staff, digital tools and enforcement capacity. Parliamentary debate on the draft legislation is set to resume next week.

As debate over the new General Tax Act (AWB) gets underway in the Dutch National Assembly, the leader of the NPS parliamentary faction, Jerrel Pawiroredjo, has voiced conditional support for expanding the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration’s (Belastingdienst) powers to crack down on tax evasion and the untapped informal economy, while raising urgent alarms over unregulated authority, inadequate institutional capacity, and threats to taxpayer rights.

Pawiroredjo’s core argument centers on a fundamental balance: a powerful tax administration can only function effectively within the framework of a strong rule of law that equally protects the rights of compliant taxpayers. For the system to retain public trust, he argues, the government must demonstrate that expanded fiscal powers are paired with clear boundaries, principles of due process, and a guarantee that compliant citizens will not face unnecessary punitive measures.

Addressing the problem of the informal economy, Pawiroredjo noted that currently registered, tax-compliant individuals and businesses are already easily audited, while large swathes of economic activity remain entirely outside the tax system’s oversight. He stressed that the AWB’s new expanded powers should not be used to pressure already compliant taxpayers, but exclusively to root out unreported economic activity. Under the new legislation, the Belastingdienst will gain broader authority to request financial data and documents, audit business records, obtain information from third parties, and access private buildings and properties under specific conditions. Pawiroredjo has called on the ruling government to provide clear details on how these powers will be targeted: what data sets will be cross-linked, which high-risk informal sectors will be prioritized, and what specific strategies will be used to identify unregistered operators.

While Pawiroredjo stressed that he has no ideological opposition to a robust tax authority, as insufficient powers would prevent the agency from fulfilling its legal mandate to collect revenue for public services including education, healthcare, infrastructure, national security, and social welfare, he insisted that all government authority must be bounded by law. Core legal principles including procedural fairness, proportionality, legal certainty, and equal treatment must guide every use of new powers. A power being formally written into law, he argued, does not grant the agency carte blanche to use it in every scenario without assessment. The government, he said, must outline explicit thresholds for when the agency can request third-party data, audit private records, demand access to business premises, or impose fines, and must always prioritize the least intrusive measure possible to achieve compliance.

One key provision drawing Pawiroredjo’s scrutiny is the rule that filing an objection to a tax assessment does not automatically suspend the requirement to pay the assessed amount. While he acknowledges the rationale for this rule — to prevent bad-faith objections from being used solely to delay payment — he warned that serious harm can be done to legitimate businesses that file well-founded objections. If the tax authority proceeds with collection actions such as asset seizure while the objection is pending, and the assessment is later found to be incorrect, the business may already suffer irreversible financial damage. To address this, he called for a clear collection policy that allows for deferred payment or suspension of enforcement actions when a properly motivated objection is submitted, noting that the relevant legislative article should not become a free pass to deploy the harshest possible measures early in a legitimate dispute.

Pawiroredjo also drew attention to risks stemming from the Belastingdienst’s ongoing digital transformation. While electronic communication and digital tax services offer clear efficiency gains, he pointed out that technical failures can create unintended barriers to taxpayer rights: notifications may fail to send, digital portals can experience outages, and documents may be marked as delivered in administrative systems even if the taxpayer never actually received them. To avoid penalizing taxpayers for administrative or technical errors outside their control, he demanded clear rules outlining when objection periods officially start, and which party bears the burden of proving that an electronic message was actually sent and received. No taxpayer should lose their right to appeal through no fault of their own, he emphasized. As the tax authority gains greater access to personal and financial data from banks, suppliers, shareholders and other third parties, Pawiroredjo also stressed that taxpayers must be guaranteed full access to all information used to generate assessments or fines, with clear protocols for due process and access to personal tax records.

Beyond questions of rights and power, Pawiroredjo raised a critical practical concern: does the current Belastingdienst actually have the institutional capacity to implement the sweeping new law effectively? The AWB imposes new obligations not just on taxpayers, but on the tax authority itself: more audits mean more open cases, expanded objection procedures require additional trained staff, robust due process demands more time per case, digital transformation requires reliable, secure information infrastructure, and fair imposition of fines requires well-trained, expert personnel. Pawiroredjo has called on the government to confirm whether a full implementation capacity analysis has been conducted ahead of the vote, and to disclose how many additional staff will be required, what IT upgrades will be needed, what the total implementation cost will be, and when the agency will be fully prepared to roll out the new framework. “When we introduce a modern piece of legislation into an organization that lacks the capacity to implement it, we create a massive problem for ourselves,” he warned.

Pawiroredjo also called for a broader cultural shift within the tax administration, arguing that the agency should move away from a default presumption of guilt toward taxpayers, and that the government must get its own administrative house in order. He highlighted common cases where taxpayers have made payments that are never properly processed administratively, leaving the taxpayer to bear the burden of proving they already fulfilled their obligation. He also proposed a default minimum two-week response period for taxpayers answering information requests from the agency, except in cases of verifiable urgent need.

The NPS faction will submit a full list of proposed amendments to the minister leading the legislation. A portion of the changes are technical adjustments, but many directly address core issues of legal certainty, taxpayer protection, and limits on executive power. Repeating his core position, Pawiroredjo stressed: “I absolutely support a strong Tax Authority. We need one.” But ultimately, he said, the goal must be “a strong taxpayer in a strong rule of law.” He even suggested that compliant taxpayers willing to fulfill their tax obligations should be welcomed and supported by the government, noting they have every right to a state that helps them rather than creates unnecessary barriers to compliance.