Scandal Hits PLN Contribution

Court prosecutors have ordered an investigation into the $10.4 million purchase of bonds in February, 2010 from the National Liberation Party (PLN) by a holding company that owns Autopistas del Sol.

The latter company is the one that built and is concessionaire for tolls on the controversial highway from San Jose to Puerto Caldera at Puntarenas.

The parent company, FCC Construction Costa Rica, is owned by Spanish investors. The legal problem may be that foreigners are forbidden to contribute to political parties by the apolitical National Elections Tribunal.

The FCC bond deal may fit a legal loophole in regulations that were set up to prevent powerful foreign interests from influencing elections. Add to that the relationship Autopistas del Sol had with the Arias Administration (2006-10) in being granted the building contract and concession and one has a suspicious mix.

But elections are not at play here, since the party already is in power in the form of the current Chinchilla Administration (2010-2014), leading to a unique situation. As the news blog InsideCostaRica observes (in different words), buying bonds in a party already in power is like betting on the horse that has already won the race!

Last April, the news blog adds, judicial detectives invaded the concessions office and those of Autopistas del Sol to look for wrongdoing.

Although not directly involved in any of this, the party's problems continue to plague President Laura Chinchilla. When she took office in May, 2010, constant problems with poor highway construction on the Caldera highway were still swirling around her party.

Add to this the scandals surrounding two multi-million dollar funds given to the government that had been used in imaginative ways their contributors did not have in mind and a subsequent Legislative Assembly investigation into one of them, implicating President Oscar Arias's chief of staff, Minister of the Presidency Rodrigo Arias.

Chinchilla herself has had troubles, the results of some hapless appointments she made to her cabinet and a growing financial crisis in the nation's public health system. (See other articles.) Her appointees have been subject to a number of resignations, some of them forced.

The most recent was when Eduardo Doryan stepped down from his post as president of the ICE power and communications company. He was chief at the financially-plagued Social Security universal health care system that threatens to crash in the next few years.