Chile con carnage

But an insider-dealing scandal has Chile’s Economy minister battling to cope with the country’s first major crisis of confidence since its banking and currency crash in the early 1980s.

But an insider-dealing scandal has Chile’s Economy minister battling to cope with the country’s first major crisis of confidence since its banking and currency crash in the early 1980s. The scandal came to a head in March when Gonzalo Rivas, executive vice president of government development agency Corfo (and Chilean President Ricardo Lagos’s son-in-law) resigned after it emerged that a Corfo trader had stolen $106 million in certificates of deposit from the agency and sold them to financial conglomerate Inverlink. The incident also led to the resignations last month of Chile’s central bank governor, Carlos Massad, and its top securities regulator, Alvaro Clarke. Now Rodríguez must repair Chile’s once-vaunted economic reputation. He vows complete reform. “Neither Chile nor any other country is a land of angels,” he says. “What is important is how to improve financial mechanisms and systems so that these crimes are not repeated. We are correcting systemic faults, and investors should feel secure in coming to Chile.”

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