Thread: Mexico Denies Official Complicity In Drug Suspect's Cash

Mexico denies official complicity in drug suspect's cash hoard
By James C. McKinley Jr.

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

MEXICO CITY: The Mexican government vigorously denied this week the accusations of a Chinese-Mexican businessman who is wanted on drug charges here but who asserts that $150 million found hidden in his mansion came from members of President Felipe Calderón's party, including the secretary of labor.

Zhenli Ye Gon, a naturalized Mexican citizen who owns a pharmaceutical company, rocked the political world here recently by suggesting, through his lawyer in New York, that the labor secretary, Javier Lozano Alarcón, had threatened to kill him last year unless he agreed to hide duffel bags stuffed with tens of millions of dollars in his house.

On Tuesday, Lozano Alarcón issued a statement calling the charges "false, absurd, untrue, crooked and perverse." A spokesman for Calderón, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the president had yet to make an official statement, said Zhenli appeared to be making false charges as part of a strategy to broker a deal with prosecutors here.

Mexico's attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora, said in a televised interview Monday that the idea that someone from Calderón's campaign or cabinet would force Zhenli to hide money seemed "ridiculous and fantastic."

"Evidently the man dedicated himself to the illicit importation of pseudoephedrine, and this was sold to drug traffickers," the attorney general said. "This money was the product of that activity."

He said the government had evidence that Zhenli, 44, had illegally imported 19 tons of pseudoephedrine, a decongestant, and intended to sell it to drug dealers who use it to manufacture methamphetamine, a synthetic stimulant known on the street as "ice."

Zhenli denied the charge in an interview with The Associated Press published Saturday; the news agency said the interview was given in the New York office of his lawyer, Ning Ye.

Zhenli said that various party officials had delivered money for him to hide, but he did not provide their names.

The Mexican authorities began investigating Zhenli in December, after discovering an illicit shipment of pseudoephedrine on a boat in the port of Lázaro Cárdenas, prosecutors say. The chemical was being shipped to Unimed, a pharmaceutical company Zhenli started in 1997, they said.

On March 15, federal agents raided his home in an affluent section of the capital. There they found about $205 million and $22 million in other currencies and traveler's checks. The money was stuffed in walls, suitcases and closets. They also seized eight luxury cars and seven high-powered firearms.
At the time, Karen Tandy, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, called the raid "the largest single drug-cash seizure the world has every seen."

Zhenli, who was born in Shanghai and became a Mexican citizen in 2002, had disappeared before the raid. Eleven other people, among them several of Zhenli's relatives, have been arrested and charged with drug trafficking in connection with the seizures.

Over the weekend, the Mexican government said Zhenli's lawyers had sent a letter to the Mexican Embassy in Washington threatening to expose an alleged link between the cash found at his house and Calderón's campaign unless prosecutors made a deal beneficial to the accused businessman.

"These lawyers are unscrupulously and uselessly looking to blackmail the Mexican government with absurd and untrue statements," the attorney general's office said Sunday.

In the AP interview, Zhenli said the labor secretary, an important member of Calderón's campaign last year, gave him about $150 million for safekeeping in May 2006, during the heat of the electoral battle.

He also denied that the chemical he had imported was pseudoephedrine, saying it was another chemical used in cough medicines.



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Calderon has been waging war on drug cartels in his country all year.

I have to say that my money is on his innocence in this deal. It looks like he has been set up by outside influences dealing drugs within the borders of Mexico. Calderon has made life very hard on dealers with the stepped up enforcement and zero tolerance efforts.

Just a guess but I think a good one.

On this one I Look to China and a still very angry political opponent with rich corrupted backers over seas.

The land of toxic toothpaste and poisoned cats and dogs.