Venezuelan opposition-led Assembly calls for Nicolas Maduro to face charges

Venezuela’s opposition-led National Assembly on Tuesday sanctioned a trial against President Nicolas Maduro on corruption charges that he allegedly received money from Brazilian construction firm Odebrectht.
The motion gives a group of exiled judges in Colombia the green light to start investigations against Maduro originally brought forward by the country’s former attorney general Luisa Ortega. They will review acccusations that Maduro reportedly accepted $50 million from Odebrecht to help fund his 2013 presidential campaign.
The judges carrying out the proceedings called themselves Venezuela’s “Supreme Court in Exile”. The group is made up of judges who were appointed by the Assembly to the country’s Supreme Court last year but who fled the country after Maduro accused them of treason.
Odebrecht is at the centre of Latin America’s biggest graft scandal. In 2016 it confessed that it orchestrated sophisticated kickback schemes across a dozen countries for more than a decade – landing elites in jail from Colombia to the Dominican Republic. Maduro has denied any involvement with the firm and dismissed the allegations as part of a smear campaign against him.
Venezuelen National Assembly President Omar Barboza said, “The National Assembly can’t stand by when someone (former attorney general Luisa Ortega) calls on a group of judges chosen by us or (calls on) any other private or public insititution to authorise a judicial process. Our authorisation doesn’t condemn or absolve anybody, it simply allows for the investigation to continue, to hold the guilty parties to account for corruption. It would be a betrayal of the people’s mandate that we have to not give the people’s authorisation.”