France24-<\/p>\n
The Congress of Guatemala has voted against lifting President Jimmy Morales’ immunity from prosecution, hours after a congressional commission recommended the protection be withdrawn to open the way for a possible trial on campaign finance accusations.<\/p>\n
Congress voted overwhelmingly on Monday not to lift the leader’s immunity, but since the measure failed to meet a threshold of 105 votes needed to settle the matter for good, it now effectively goes into a dormant state and can be reconsidered in another session of Congress.<\/p>\n
Earlier Monday, Julio Ixcamey, head of a five-member commission charged with examining the case, said it had found evidence of unregistered money in campaign funds.<\/p>\n
But he also said Morales “did not have a direct participation in registering funds and contributions”.<\/p>\n
Last week, the country’s Supreme Court said that there appeared to be “sufficient evidence to allow the transfer of the case to Congress”. This gave way for legislators\u00a0to vote<\/a>\u00a0on the issue.<\/p>\n Prosecutors allege that about $825,000 in financing for Morales’ campaign was hidden and that other expenditures had no explainable source of funding. The president has denied any wrongdoing.<\/p>\n In August, chief prosecutor Thelma Adana and Ivan Velasquez, the head of a UN anti-corruption commission (CICIG) operating in Guatemala, announced they were seeking to have Morales’ immunity stripped.<\/p>\n Two days later the president ordered Velasquez’s immediate expulsion from the country, but that was swiftly overturned by the Constitutional Court.<\/p>\n Morales won the presidency in 2015, running on a platform of honest governance after his predecessor Otto Perez Molina was forced to resign and was imprisoned in a multi-million dollar corruption case stemming from a CICIG investigation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" France24- The Congress of Guatemala has voted against lifting President Jimmy Morales’ immunity from prosecution, hours after a congressional commission recommended the protection be withdrawn to open the way for a possible trial on campaign finance accusations. Congress voted overwhelmingly on Monday not to lift the leader’s immunity, but since the measure failed to meet a threshold of 105 votes… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/52"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=869"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":870,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/869\/revisions\/870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}