Mexican Government Contractor Who Built First Lady's Mansion Is Exposed In The Panama Papers

Dolia Estevez

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I cover Mexico's billionaires, politics and U.S.-Mexico relations

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The Panama Papers, a massive leak of documents on the world of offshore financing used frequently by many of the richest and most powerful around the globe, sheds light on the finances of Mexican businessman Juan Armando Hinojosa Cantú, described as Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s “favorite contractor.”

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), a Washington-based nonprofit anti-corruption investigative group, and 100 other international news organizations—including Proceso and Aristegui Noticias from Mexico-worked for a year sorting through the massive data.

The award-winning group said it obtained a cache of 11.5 million records from Mossack Fonseca–a law firm in Panama that is reportedly one of the world’s biggest creators of shell companies. The documents were originally given by an anonymous source to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which in turn shared them with ICIJ.

(Photo image: YouTube/
Angelica Rivera)

Hinojosa and other prominent Mexicans, mostly businessmen with close ties to the government, including at least one member of the Forbes billionaires list, were the subject of extensive articles published on line by Proceso and Aristegui Noticias Sunday to coincide with the ICIJ posting of the Panama Papers.

Proceso, Mexico’s leading weekly magazine, reported that Hinojosa, a wealthy entrepreneur whose company, Grupo Higa, won multimillion-dollar contracts from the State of Mexico when Peña Nieto was its governor, secretly shuffled $100 million through banks and shadow companies.

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According to Proceso, Mossack Fonseca, in collaboration with the Mexican branch of the law firm D’Orleans & Bourbon Associates, helped Hinojosa and his wife set up a series of shell companies on behalf of family members—including their respective mothers who are in their 80s–in New Zealand. Hinojosa and his wife then “donated” millions of dollars to the shell companies, which acted as beneficiaries of a foundation in Holland.

The firms were aware that the $100 million was just a “small part” of Hinojosa’s wealth,Proceso reports. In July 2015, an advisor with D’Orleans, Bourbon & Associates in Miami, sent an “urgent” email message to a Olga Santini, director of Mossack Fonseca’s branch in Florida.

“Please note that we have been working together with the advisor of a very high profile client for some time and we envision that we will be appointed to assist in the restructure of his patrimonial vehicle outside his country of residence.

The structure would involve:

(1) Transfer of six (6) companies—four (4) BVI and two (2) Nevis from current provider (Trident);

(2) Appointment of nominee director & nominee shareholder for the above mentioned companies;

(3) Formation of three (3) NZ Trusts—which will be the beneficiaries of a Dutch foundation (STAK) and subsequent settlement of assets (portfolio accounts in four banks—JP Morgan, UBS, DB and MS—of circa USD 100M) owned by the before mentioned six (6) companies.

(4) Once the transfer is complete, dissolution of the six (6) companies,” reads the email.

A screen shot of the original document was published by Proceso.

The author of the memo, who Proceso identifies as Felipe Miguel Fernandes de Matos, though his name is crossed out, added: “This is only a small part of the client’s portfolio and we see great potential of (sic) growth as he is one of the most prominent business man (sic) in Mexico. Unfortunately due to his success and high profile, he has quiet (sic) a number of people whom greatly dislike him and unfortunately, there is a great deal of negative publicity surrounding the client.“

With the email, the author sent the first pages of Hinojosa’s and his wife’s Mexican passports, with the notation that they, “…would be the first beneficiaries of the trust (for which we ask that it remains of the upmost confidentiality…)” Proceso reproduced both diplomatic documents.

In 2014,  Aristegui Noticias reported that Angelica Rivera, a former soap opera star and current wife of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, bought  a US $7 million mansion from Hinojosa in one of Mexico City’s upscale neighborhoods.

Facing mounting public protest, Peña Nieto ordered one of his hand-picked ministers to conduct an investigation, but the investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing by the President and or his wife.

According to Proceso, Hinojosa began transferring his wealth in March of 2015, a week after Peña Nieto ordered the investigation.

Mossack Fonseca issued a response to the ICIJ report stating that as a registered agent it is simply helping its clients incorporate companies and that the law firm conducts thorough due-diligence, “one that in every case meets and quite often exceeds all relevant local rules, regulations and standards to which we and others are bound.” (For Mossack Fonseca’s complete response, see here.)

Grupo Higa did not respond to Proceso’s requests for comment.  This reporter was unable to contact Grupo Higa. Their website does not provide an email or phone number.

Paulo Careño King, a spokesperson for Peña Nieto, said the “story was a little old” and referred reporters to the government’s investigation exonerating the President and his wife.

Mexico’s Service of Tax Administration, the country’s equivalent of the IRS, said Monday that it would review the information on the Mexicans mentioned in the Panama Papers to determine if there was evidence of tax evasion.

Twitter: @DoliaEstevez

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Sabbath

By OLIVER SACKS

AUGUST 14, 2015

MY mother and her 17 brothers and sisters had an Orthodox upbringing — all photographs of their father show him wearing a yarmulke, and I was told that he woke up if it fell off during the night. My father, too, came from an Orthodox background. Both my parents were very conscious of the Fourth Commandment (“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy”), and the Sabbath (Shabbos, as we called it in our Litvak way) was entirely different from the rest of the week. No work was allowed, no driving, no use of the telephone; it was forbidden to switch on a light or a stove. Being physicians, my parents made exceptions. They could not take the phone off the hook or completely avoid driving; they had to be available, if necessary, to see patients, or operate, or deliver babies.

We lived in a fairly Orthodox Jewish community in Cricklewood, in Northwest London — the butcher, the baker, the grocer, the greengrocer, the fishmonger, all closed their shops in good time for the Shabbos, and did not open their shutters till Sunday morning. All of them, and all our neighbors, we imagined, were celebrating Shabbos in much the same fashion as we did.

Around midday on Friday, my mother doffed her surgical identity and attire and devoted herself to making gefilte fish and other delicacies for Shabbos. Just before evening fell, she would light the ritual candles, cupping their flames with her hands, and murmuring a prayer. We would all put on clean, fresh Shabbos clothes, and gather for the first meal of the Sabbath, the evening meal. My father would lift his silver wine cup and chant the blessings and the Kiddush, and after the meal, he would lead us all in chanting the grace.

On Saturday mornings, my three brothers and I trailed our parents to Cricklewood Synagogue on Walm Lane, a huge shul built in the 1930s to accommodate part of the exodus of Jews from the East End to Cricklewood at that time. The shul was always full during my boyhood, and we all had our assigned seats, the men downstairs, the women — my mother, various aunts and cousins — upstairs; as a little boy, I sometimes waved to them during the service. Though I could not understand the Hebrew in the prayer book, I loved its sound and especially hearing the old medieval prayers sung, led by our wonderfully musical hazan.

All of us met and mingled outside the synagogue after the service — and we would usually walk to the house of my Auntie Florrie and her three children to say a Kiddush, accompanied by sweet red wine and honey cakes, just enough to stimulate our appetites for lunch. After a cold lunch at home — gefilte fish, poached salmon, beetroot jelly — Saturday afternoons, if not interrupted by emergency medical calls for my parents, would be devoted to family visits. Uncles and aunts and cousins would visit us for tea, or we them; we all lived within walking distance of one another.

The Second World War decimated our Jewish community in Cricklewood, and the Jewish community in England as a whole was to lose thousands of people in the postwar years. Many Jews, including cousins of mine, emigrated to Israel; others went to Australia, Canada or the States; my eldest brother, Marcus, went to Australia in 1950. Many of those who stayed assimilated and adopted diluted, attenuated forms of Judaism. Our synagogue, which would be packed to capacity when I was a child, grew emptier by the year.

I chanted my bar mitzvah portion in 1946 to a relatively full synagogue, including several dozen of my relatives, but this, for me, was the end of formal Jewish practice. I did not embrace the ritual duties of a Jewish adult — praying every day, putting on tefillin before prayer each weekday morning — and I gradually became more indifferent to the beliefs and habits of my parents, though there was no particular point of rupture until I was 18. It was then that my father, inquiring into my sexual feelings, compelled me to admit that I liked boys.

“I haven’t done anything,” I said, “it’s just a feeling — but don’t tell Ma, she won’t be able to take it.”

He did tell her, and the next morning she came down with a look of horror on her face, and shrieked at me: “You are an abomination. I wish you had never been born.” (She was no doubt thinking of the verse in Leviticus that read, “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: They shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”)

The matter was never mentioned again, but her harsh words made me hate religion’s capacity for bigotry and cruelty.

After I qualified as a doctor in 1960, I removed myself abruptly from England and what family and community I had there, and went to the New World, where I knew nobody. When I moved to Los Angeles, I found a sort of community among the weight lifters on Muscle Beach, and with my fellow neurology residents at U.C.L.A., but I craved some deeper connection — “meaning” — in my life, and it was the absence of this, I think, that drew me into near-suicidal addiction to amphetamines in the 1960s.

Recovery started, slowly, as I found meaningful work in New York, in a chronic care hospital in the Bronx (the “Mount Carmel” I wrote about in “Awakenings”). I was fascinated by my patients there, cared for them deeply, and felt something of a mission to tell their stories — stories of situations virtually unknown, almost unimaginable, to the general public and, indeed, to many of my colleagues. I had discovered my vocation, and this I pursued doggedly, single-mindedly, with little encouragement from my colleagues. Almost unconsciously, I became a storyteller at a time when medical narrative was almost extinct. This did not dissuade me, for I felt my roots lay in the great neurological case histories of the 19th century (and I was encouraged here by the great Russian neuropsychologist A. R. Luria). It was a lonely but deeply satisfying, almost monkish existence that I was to lead for many years.

During the 1990s, I came to know a cousin and contemporary of mine, Robert John Aumann, a man of remarkable appearance with his robust, athletic build and long white beard that made him, even at 60, look like an ancient sage. He is a man of great intellectual power but also of great human warmth and tenderness, and deep religious commitment — “commitment,” indeed, is one of his favorite words. Although, in his work, he stands for rationality in economics and human affairs, there is no conflict for him between reason and faith.

He insisted I have a mezuza on my door, and brought me one from Israel. “I know you don’t believe,” he said, “but you should have one anyhow.” I didn’t argue.

In a remarkable 2004 interview, Robert John spoke of his lifelong work in mathematics and game theory, but also of his family — how he would go skiing and mountaineering with some of his nearly 30 children and grandchildren (a kosher cook, carrying saucepans, would accompany them), and the importance of the Sabbath to him.

“The observance of the Sabbath is extremely beautiful,” he said, “and is impossible without being religious. It is not even a question of improving society — it is about improving one’s own quality of life.”

In December of 2005, Robert John received a Nobel Prize for his 50 years of fundamental work in economics. He was not entirely an easy guest for the Nobel Committee, for he went to Stockholm with his family, including many of those children and grandchildren, and all had to have special kosher plates, utensils and food, and special formal clothes, with no biblically forbidden admixture of wool and linen.

THAT same month, I was found to have cancer in one eye, and while I was in the hospital for treatment the following month, Robert John visited. He was full of entertaining stories about the Nobel Prize and the ceremony in Stockholm, but made a point of saying that, had he been compelled to travel to Stockholm on a Saturday, he would have refused the prize. His commitment to the Sabbath, its utter peacefulness and remoteness from worldly concerns, would have trumped even a Nobel.

In 1955, as a 22-year-old, I went to Israel for several months to work on a kibbutz, and though I enjoyed it, I decided not to go again. Even though so many of my cousins had moved there, the politics of the Middle East disturbed me, and I suspected I would be out of place in a deeply religious society. But in the spring of 2014, hearing that my cousin Marjorie — a physician who had been a protégée of my mother’s and had worked in the field of medicine till the age of 98 — was nearing death, I phoned her in Jerusalem to say farewell. Her voice was unexpectedly strong and resonant, with an accent very much like my mother’s. “I don’t intend to die now,” she said, “I will be having my 100th birthday on June 18th. Will you come?”

I said, “Yes, of course!” When I hung up, I realized that in a few seconds I had reversed a decision of almost 60 years. It was purely a family visit. I celebrated Marjorie’s 100th with her and extended family. I saw two other cousins dear to me in my London days, innumerable second and removed cousins, and, of course, Robert John. I felt embraced by my family in a way I had not known since childhood.

I had felt a little fearful visiting my Orthodox family with my lover, Billy — my mother’s words still echoed in my mind — but Billy, too, was warmly received. How profoundly attitudes had changed, even among the Orthodox, was made clear by Robert John when he invited Billy and me to join him and his family at their opening Sabbath meal.

The peace of the Sabbath, of a stopped world, a time outside time, was palpable, infused everything, and I found myself drenched with a wistfulness, something akin to nostalgia, wondering what if: What if A and B and C had been different? What sort of person might I have been? What sort of a life might I have lived?

In December 2014, I completed my memoir, “On the Move,” and gave the manuscript to my publisher, not dreaming that days later I would learn I had metastatic cancer, coming from the melanoma I had in my eye nine years earlier. I am glad I was able to complete my memoir without knowing this, and that I had been able, for the first time in my life, to make a full and frank declaration of my sexuality, facing the world openly, with no more guilty secrets locked up inside me.

In February, I felt I had to be equally open about my cancer — and facing death. I was, in fact, in the hospital when my essay on this, “My Own Life,” was published in this newspaper. In July I wrote another piece for the paper, “My Periodic Table,” in which the physical cosmos, and the elements I loved, took on lives of their own.

And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.
Oliver Sacks is a professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine and the author, most recently, of the memoir “On the Move.”

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