A former president of Ecuador has been sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty of accepting bribes. Lenín Moreno insisted that he had not accepted money from a Chinese company that won a contract to build a hydroelectric plant in the Latin American country. The 73-year-old will serve his sentence under house arrest due to his age and disability, and has already expressed his intention to appeal the sentence after a court in the capital, Quito, found him and 19 others guilty of corruption. Moreno, who was president between 2017 and 2021, is the third former Ecuadorian leader convicted of corruption. Prosecutors alleged that Chinese state-owned Sinohydro paid a total of $76.1m (£56.2m) through shell companies to people involved in the deal to secure the construction of the Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric dam. Among those sentenced to prison were Moreno’s wife, daughter and brother, as well as former plant managers, Sinohydro representatives and a Chinese ambassador to Ecuador. While Moreno himself allegedly received very little from the scheme, prosecutors said family members received tens of thousands of dollars. Those convicted of bribery will have to return three times what they were given, while Moreno was excluded from any public office. He denied involvement in the alleged bribery scheme and instead blamed another former president, Rafael Correa, under whom he served as vice president and who was sentenced to eight years in prison in a separate bribery case in 2020. Moreno argued that Correa had approved the Coca Codo Sinclair project and had launched an investigation into problems with the construction when he became president. The Ecuadorian government initiated legal proceedings against Sinohydro in 2021 due to the appearance of cracks in the dam and other technical failures. It reached a $400 million settlement with the company’s owner earlier this year. The BBC has contacted Sinohydro and the Chinese embassy in Ecuador for comment.
