7/23/2017 Reuters
A former state governor from Mexico’s ruling party will stand trial for engaging in organized crime and handling funds of illicit origin after a judge reviewing evidence approved the case, the attorney general’s office said on Saturday.
Javier Duarte, who until 2016 governed the Gulf coast state of Veracruz for President Enrique Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), has been accused by the opposition of siphoning off millions of dollars during his six-year tenure.
On Monday, Duarte was extradited to Mexico from Guatemala, where he was captured in April after spending months on the run. He has denied any wrongdoing. Some doubts had surfaced in the past few days about the strength of the case against him.
However, after presenting 82 pieces of evidence in hearings on Saturday, the attorney general’s office said in a statement that the judge gave prosecutors six months to proceed with the investigation against 43-year-old Duarte.
Mexico’s annual inflation rate eased less than expected in the first half of July, data showed on Monday, but still lent weight to the central bank’s view that price pressures in Latin America’s second biggest economy may be peaking.
Mexico’s oil sector has just become exotic.
Mexico’s ruling party is running in third place with less than a year to go before the next presidential election, well behind the new party of leftist hopeful Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, an opinion poll showed on Sunday.
Mexico’s Pemex reopened two long-term bonds to raise some $5 billion on international markets, using some of the proceeds to repurchase debt expiring over the next two years, the state-run oil company said on Sunday.
WASHINGTON/OTTAWA (Reuters) – Top Canadian and Mexican diplomats expressed optimism on Thursday that a NAFTA deal could be reached early next year and cautioned that widespread uncertainty over the future of the three-way trade agreement had slowed business investment.