Journalist defends scathing report against powerful senator

Santo Domingo.- The journalist Nuria Piera on Monday said she doesn’t understand why people who helped her investigative work in the case of the senator Felix Bautista are being questioned and the material that supported it is being sought, if the information she presented in her program doesn’t have validity.

On March 31 Piera aired a report which showed documents such as bank transactions, payment receipts, letters, agendas and a list of real properties linked to Bautista’s companies.

She said she received information that Government intelligence services allegedly searched residences and businesses of the person who served as support, a situation she says concerns her. “They shouldn’t create unease in some families who are being investigated by the authorities to detect the person who provided the reports and account numbers of the companies linked to senator Felix Bautista.”

Different sectors of the Government have denied her denunciation and even Haiti’s government’s reacted and rejected that its president, Michel Martelly had struck deals with Bautista, as the journalist had denounced.

Recently the ruling PLD party’s top echelon, the Political Committee, and nearly all the senators stated their support for the senator from San Juan de la Maguana province, and reiterated his right to enter into transactions as an engineer.