Former President Piñera – the only Right-wing leader since the return of democracy – used to spend the first half of February at his home in Bahía Coique in Futrono. It was normal and his habit for years that while on vacation he moved around in his personal helicopter. Even as President, he liked to pilot in the area, which led to GOPE troops being deployed throughout the area. This February 6, his last flight ended in a fatal accident when his helicopter fell on Lake Ranco, in the landscapes that he loved so much.
Miguel Juan Sebastian Piñera Echenique He was born on December 1, 1949 in Santiago, as the third son of José Piñera Carvallo and Magdalena Echenique Rozas. His father was an engineer by profession and a Corfo official, but he also represented Chile in various diplomatic tasks, especially under the government of Eduardo Frei Montalva, of whom he was a friend and coreligionist in the Christian Democracy.
Regarding his parents, former President Piñera noted: “My father was an intellectual, idealist and bohemian, a guy who liked nightlife, conversation and the debate of ideas, hopefully with a glass of red in one hand and a cigarette.” in the other. He never punished us, he never controlled us. He let us be. He was interested in us being free. He was one of those old men who follow you from above. My mother, on the other hand, was much more earthly and pragmatic. She is also very pious. She came from a traditional, aristocratic and conservative family, with a long past in the countryside, of typical Basque origin. She was also very frank. From her I also got the frontal style of saying things. Thus, with a very strong character, she taught us discipline, she sat us down to pray the rosary, the month of Mary, she made sure we did our homework. This was essential in my training. Not so much because of my faith in God, since I believe that faith cannot be imposed and I see it rather as a gift that I have received, but because in that rigor he instilled in me a taste for reading, for studying. My mother was also very austere and very far-sighted, unlike my father, who lived from day to day and liked the good life.”
Miguel Juan Sebastián grew up trying to stand out among his five brothers, maintaining a certain rivalry with the eldest, José, who was a block with Guadalupe. “They were more independent. The rest was headed by him. “In my house, you had to have tough leather. The carvings and jokes could be very heavy. Hiding emotions, going hard through life, could be a good survival strategy. That explains, I think, a good part of my character,” he said on the same occasion.
In 1964, his father was appointed ambassador to Belgium. Thus he went from being a regular student of the Divine Word to a good student at the Saint Boniface boarding school in Brussels. In 1967, when his father assumed the Chilean Embassy in the United Nations (UN), he returned to Chile for his last year of school at Verbo Divino. He had already improved his grades and ended up studying commercial engineering at the Catholic University. He graduated in 1971 and received the Raúl Iver award for the best student in his class. He studied a master’s degree and a doctorate in Economics at Harvard University. That’s what he was for the Coup d’état. He said that then he called his girlfriend on the phone and proposed marriage. He married Cecilia Morel Montes in December 1973. They had four children: Magdalena, Cecilia, Sebastián and Cristóbal.
Back in Chile, he was a consultant to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) (1974-1976), a consultant to the World Bank (1975-1978); and worked at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). At the same time, he took classes, mainly at the Catholic University.
The first businesses
A few years ago he declared: “I have always had great energy to undertake everything I do. I believe that I inherited it from my father, who was inexhaustible, although fickle. He always told us: ‘Do what you want, but do it well, with passion, with desire. Don’t be content with warming the seat.’ In the end, I feel that a good part of the strength required to form companies lies in self-confidence. There is no point: one has to believe it. One of the first large companies I formed, for example, nearly went under several times. “I think I saved Bancard many times through optimism and perseverance.”
Indeed, in 1976, in the midst of the dictatorship, he created Bancard SA and brought representation of Visa and Master Card credit cards to Chile. He has said that it was his first great business adventure, because he created an industry that did not exist and he always talked about it. He also said that “I also have a lot of affection for the investment in Lan with the Cuetos; When we took it over, it was a small, indebted company, with just seven outdated aircraft and no major prestige. It was an organization with low confidence and zero self-esteem, and I can’t help but feel a rush of pride down my spine when I see what it is today: a modern company, with more than 100 aircraft, a prestigious, motivated and successful organization, one of the most efficient and competitive airlines in the world and a brand that has taken the name of Chile literally to half the world,” he said.
But not all of them were good deals. In 1982, Banco de Talca, of which Sebastián Piñera was general manager, was liquidated. After the closure of the entity, several of its controllers were prosecuted for fraud and violations of the General Banking Law. Miguel Calaf and Alberto Danioni were arrested and declared prisoners. Days later, Sebastián Piñera, Carlos Massad and Emiliano Figueroa Sandoval were also declared prisoners. But his arrest warrants were annulled by the Supreme Court after the filing of an appeal for protection. During that period Piñera remained a fugitive, which he always denied. Decades later, the former Minister of Justice of the dictatorship, Mónica Madariaga, assured that she intervened before the Judiciary to avoid the prosecution of “Tatán” for the bankruptcy of the Bank of Talca, after which the Supreme Court accepted an appeal for protection that He prevented him from being arrested and prosecuted by the then judge Luis Correa Bulo, who confirmed the pressure from the military regime as a “favor” to his brother José Piñera (Pinochet’s Minister of Labor, author of the AFP and the labor plan).
The return of democracy
Detractors and admirers of Sebastián Piñera agree that something he always wanted was to be loved, recognized by the people, by the people, something that was difficult for him to experience in life.
Of the DC stamp, he was for the “No” option in the 1988 Plebiscite, but, later, when democracy returned and he wanted to run for the Senate, he did not find support in his father’s party, which is why he joined Renovación as a soldier. National (RN), thanks to which he obtained a senatorial seat, serving as senator between 1990 and 1998, but without abandoning his businesses, for which he was always criticized.
He had been in the Senate for two years and he, along with other then young leaders of that party, such as Andrés Allamand, Evelyn Matthei and Alberto Espina, formed the so-called “Youth Patrol” of the right. Piñera and Matthei, in addition, stood as the two strongest cards to assume a presidential candidacy for the right, in the elections that would be held at the end of 1993. But in August 1992 the so-called “kiotazo” occurred.
In a live program on the then Mega television channel, the businessman and owner of the same medium, Ricardo Claro, put a battery-powered Kyoto radio on the table, which he used to broadcast an audio in which Piñera asked his friend Pedro Pablo Díaz influenced the journalist Jorge Andrés Richards (host of that program), so that in an upcoming broadcast, where Evelyn Matthei was going to be invited, he would “leave her like a little goat” with questions that, among other things, had to do with with its position regarding divorce, which still does not exist in Chile.
The telephone conversation was recorded by Army intelligence agents at the Telecommunications Command in Peñalolén, as was later verified. A captain was the one who gave the tape to Matthei’s command, who sent it to Ricardo Claro. After that, both left their candidacies, and Matthei left the National Renewal (RN) militancy. Sebastián Piñera, meanwhile, became obsessed with the event and began to investigate about it, but he stopped doing so when one of the most unknown episodes of the transition to democracy occurred and which, at the time, remained in the strictest secret for a long time: the kidnapping of one of his sons, in 1993, who was held by unknown persons for almost an hour and which was always related to military intelligence.
In 1997, attention on Piñera focused on the Chispas case, which involved Endesa (which had bought the Chilean company Enersis, a company created in the privatization process of Chilectra and Endesa at the end of the dictatorship). José Yuraszeck (UDI), partner and member of the board of directors of Enersis, and his then partners, sold the Enersis securities to Endesa for an overvalued amount, in what was also known as “The deal of the century”, which greatly harmed the other shareholders (those who received a much lower price per share), among them, the then senator Sebastián Piñera (RN). In the end he managed to get a premium and was accused of using his status as a senator to obtain it. For this fraud, Yuraszeck and his partners were fined $75 million, but the profits obtained in the deal were estimated at $400 million.
His first mandate
Later, Piñera would be president of RN (2001-2004). He ran three times for the Presidency of Chile: first in 2005, being defeated by Michelle Bachelet in the second round; then in 2009, where he beat Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle in the runoff, becoming the first right-wing President to be democratically elected since 1958; and in 2017, where he defeated Alejandro Guillier in the second round.
He created the Futuro Foundation, aimed at educational initiatives. Through her he founded Tantauco Park (2004). To do this, he purchased 115 thousand hectares of native forest on the large island of Chiloé, which corresponds to 15% of its surface, for 6 million dollars. In this regard, the Huilliche people have claimed “ancestral and legal rights.”
In 2009 it faced a new controversy, when in March of that year the investigation into price collusion between pharmacy chains was made public. Given this, he publicly condemned the situation, considering it absolutely unacceptable. However, PPD parliamentarians accused him of having a double standard, since he had shares in FASA, one of the chains involved. However, the then-candidate stated that he had no idea that he had them and that he would sell them. He did it for 1.4 billion pesos (2.4 million dollars).
Among the milestones of his first government are the reconstruction after the 2010 earthquake, as well as the rescue of the San José mine (2010), the six-month postnatal law (2011), the approval of the Zamudio Law (2012), the closure of the Cordillera prison (2013) and the installation in the political discourse of the concept “passive accomplices” in the commemoration of the 40 years of the Coup d’état (2013), as well as the reception of the adverse ruling of the Court of The Hague on the maritime delimitation between Chile and Peru (2014).
In 2016, The counter reported that, in the midst of Peru’s trial against Chile over maritime boundaries before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Piñera made a relevant investment in the Exalmar SA Fishing Company, one of the largest in Peru, which was favored in their fishing rights due to the ruling issued on January 27, 2014 by the aforementioned international court. That is to say; In broad terms, part of what Chile lost at the hands of Peru in that trial was gained by the former president and his two Chilean partners (Rodrigo Sarquis and Juan José Cueto) with their investments in that Peruvian company. From Bancard they emphasized that most of the participation of Piñera’s company in the Peruvian fishing industry was acquired after the presidential term and the ruling of the International Court of The Hague, and they insist that neither that international trial nor its results They were factors to consider, nor did they influence the decision to invest in said company.
An investigation published by Ciper in 2017 revealed the case of so-called zombie companies,
In 2017, former President Piñera appeared in Forbes magazine with a total fortune of 2.7 billion dollars. However, as part of his presidential candidacy, he had to declare his assets, which he did for a total amount of 600 million. Then Ciper revealed that the candidate had an undeclared sum in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands, where in 2004 he had created the company Piñera Asociados, which two years later he renamed Inversiones Odisea Limitada, being accused of carrying out international tax evasion.
Taxes, their children and tax havens
Through Bancard Inversiones Limitada – a company that the late former president controlled with 66% of the property – Piñera began in early 2015 to transfer resources from Chile to his children’s companies abroad. Indeed, Sebastián Piñera Echenique reformulated his business group and transferred more than US$500 million to companies of his children in the British Virgin Islands (IVB) and Luxembourg, both considered tax havens according to the Internal Revenue Service.
But the transfers were not made as established by law, so the Internal Revenue Service (SII) began an inspection against him and detected irregularities in a financing operation for his children and the non-payment of taxes on it during two years, taxes that included – during his second presidential term – a remission of fines by the State.
According to a document entered by the then communist deputy, Daniel Núñez (now a senator) to request an investigative commission, in 2015 “a transfer was made by Bancard Inversiones Limitada, a company controlled by the then candidate for the presidency of the República Sebastián Piñera and his family, of US 96 million to the related company Bancard Investment based in the British Virgin Islands, a territory included in the list of countries considered tax havens.”
The request also details that “this operation was supervised by the Internal Revenue Service, which determined the existence of a violation of the rules of the Income Tax Law, which involved non-payment of taxes between the years 2016 and 2017.” .
According to this background “in the same period, Bancard Inversiones transferred another US $400 million to related companies in the British Virgin Islands and Luxembourg, operations where there is no evidence of the payment of taxes or supervision by the SII.”
From the accounting for the years 2015 and 2016 of the Bancard Group – with tax effects for the years 2016 and 2017 -, the SII investigation revealed that The transfer of $68 billion that Piñera Echenique made in 2015 from Bancard Inversiones Limitada to Bancard International Investment, controlled by his children in the British Virgin Islands, was irregular.
The SII reported that in this transfer from Piñera Echenique to his children, no remuneration rates were agreed upon, so the respective taxes were not paid. That is, in the operation, there was no payment of interest from the children to the father, so the respective tax could not be collected in two years: 2016 and 2017..
Total, It would be about US$542 million that left Chile for those tax havens. Among the destinations is Inversiones Odisea.
Enjoy and conflicts of interest
Among the many conflicts of interest that he was accused of during his lifetime, is the case of the Enjoy casinos, in which, as revealed by journalist Alejandra Matus, Piñera would have signed a decree to save the company from bankruptcy, and in 2015 his son Sebastián Piñera Morel and José Miguel Bulnes, through their company BP Capital, bought 36.8% of Inversiones Inmobiliarias Enjoy SpA to develop real estate projects. Likewise, BP Capital raised large sums of money in 2017, through opaque bonds.
In the context of the Pandora Papers global investigation, the million-dollar purchase and sale of the Dominga mining company, between Sebastián Piñera and Carlos Alberto Délano, in the Virgin Islands, also came to light. The Piñera Morels were the main shareholders of the Dominga project, but in December 2010 Délano bought the participation of all the other partners for 152 million dollars, payable in three installments. The last, subject to there being no regulatory changes that would hinder the installation of the mine and its port, which depended on the Piñera government. The then presidential family would have obtained a profit of 1,000% in 18 months.
Second Term
He was elected president again at the end of 2017, after a campaign in which he placed a strong emphasis on the issue of citizen security. During his second term, the management of the COVID-19 pandemic, the promulgation of the Universal Guaranteed Pension law (2021), which complements the Basic Solidarity Pension, created by the former President Bachelet; as well as the gender identity law (2021). He did not sign the Treaty of Escazú that had been processed by the Bachelet government and also “shelved” the constitutional reform proposal worked on in the Michelle Bachelet government.
Without a doubt, the strongest test he faced was the social outbreak, during which he uttered the famous phrase: “we are at war against a powerful enemy.” Subsequently, he assured that the mobilizations that took place since October 19, 2019 throughout the country sought to affect “the very foundations of democracy” and that it was “a non-traditional (attempted) coup d’état, because the Forces were not Armed.”
During this period it reached 82% rejection and only 6% approval, according to the CEP survey. As a result of the fight against the demonstrations, massive violations of Human Rights occurred, where hundreds of people were affected and dozens of them lost their eyes at the hands of the Carabineros. As a result of these actions, members of the Carabineros high command and other State agents and former Piñera government authorities face complaints for human rights violations. In fact, the Chilean Commission on Human Rights (CCHDH) sent a complaint filed against former President Sebastián Piñera and former authorities who made up his cabinet to the Prosecutor’s Office of the International Criminal Court, accusing him of having committed crimes against humanity. The libel seeks to “place the responsibilities of civil and military authorities in the widespread and systematic violation of human rights” following the social outbreak.
The criminal actions are definitively extinguished, according to the law, with the death of the accused Sebastián Piñera Echenique.