How criminals make their crimes legal

(This article was first published November 27, 2013 on the website of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ website)

Your work on the “Finnish Project” and Alcatel bribery investigations helped send two former presidents of Costa Rica to jail. How did you find out about the story?

The work was done as a team with my colleague Ernesto Rivera. We investigated two different cases back in 2004 that triggered the criminal investigations against the two former presidents.

The first case, known in Costa Rica as the “Finnish Project”, related to a US$39 million purchase of medical equipment from Finland. We proved that the representative of the Finnish company in Costa Rica gave a house, as a bribe, to the president of the Costa Rican Public Health Institution (CCSS), Eliseo Vargas. He had promoted, as a congressman, a law that made possible the “Finnish Project.”

Giannina Segnini.

We got access to the bank accounts where the Finnish money flowed, and we analyzed their operations. We discovered that a company related to former president Rafael Angel Calderón also received money. We discovered from this company’s accounts that besides the Finnish money, there was only one other source of money: a rural law firm. This law firm had deposited half a million dollars into the company’s Panamanian accounts.

Digging into the law firm’s connections and legal reports, we found out that it was managing contracts for Alcatel, the massive French telecommunications company. Later it was proved that the law firm paid most of the bribes to public officials in order to get mobile contracts for Alcatel from the then-public monopoly of the telecommunications company, ICE. The officials who got payments included Costa Rica’s former president Miguel Angel Rodríguez.

What was the crucial breakthrough for you in reporting the Finnish Project and Alcatel stories? What approach did you use to get that information?

The investigation took us about a year and during that time there were many breakthroughs and revelations. For me, there were two particularly crucial moments: when we found a legal document that linked an employee of the Finnish company, Corporación Fischel, with the purchase of a house for Eliseo Vargas (the president of the Costa Rican Public Health Insitute). The other one we discovered searching on the internet. It showed that Corporacion Fischel’s President, Walter Reiche Fischel, was the president of the Panamanian company that paid for the house.

What are the key lessons you learned from your work on the Finnish Project and Alcatel investigations?

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