Dominican presidential candidates: You stole more than us

Santo Domingo.- ‘You stole more than we, we didn’t steal as much as you’ seems to be the summary of the salvoes launched Monday in the start of a campaign for the presidency which promises more fluff than substance.

Opposition PRD party presidential candidate Hipólito Mejía said president Leonel Fernandez violated the Constitution in his address to Congress on February 27, when in his view, the chief executive voiced “lies, stories and fables” instead of a rendering of accounts. “One the most memorable acts of fiction in Dominican history.”

The ex president also denounced that top level government officials and ruling PLD party leaders have become the country’s most powerful economic group. “What’s suspicious is that Leonel and his pal Danilo (Medina, presidential candidate) have never done the exercise of seeing in what houses PLD officials lived in 1996, how they transported, what they drank, and the hats they used, and to see the mansions where they live now and the villas where they vacation in, the jets and helicopters that they own.”

PLD responds

The PLD’s top echelon the Political Committee immediately responded to Mejía, warning that the country "cannot go backwards with a man who incarnates chaos, incompetence and disorder."

It said neither Fernandez nor Medina have villas, contrary to (Mejia) a person who left office with one in Jarabacoa and another in San Cristobal.

The PLD added that in his financial statement of 2000 Mejia said he was worth RD$19.0 million, and three years later told a Univision journalist that he was worth as much as US$3.0 million.