Former Pemex head Lozoya banned from office

Former Pemex chief executive Emilio Lozoya is banned from holding public office for 10 years after Mexico's civil service ministry found he had submitted a false declaration of assets.

The civil service ministry, SFP, said yesterday that two senior Pemex officials who served during former president Enrique Pena Nieto's administration are banned from public office following "a painstaking" investigation.

Lozoya was found to have omitted a bank account containing hundreds of thousands of pesos, roughly tens of thousands in US dollars, from his asset declaration on two occasions, SFP said.

But Lozoya, while a beneficiary of the account, is not the account holder and not required to declare it, Lozoya's lawyer Javier Coello said yesterday.

"He did not lie in the declarations," Coello said. "The account that he supposedly did not declare belongs to his mother."

Lozoya will appeal the decision, Coello said.

A second, unidentified high-ranking official, was banned from public office for 15 years and fined Ps620mn ($32mn) for his role in the purchase of Grupo Fertinal, a struggling fertilizer company that Pemex bought for Ps620mn, despite being valued at much less.

Lozoya, chief executive of Pemex between 2012 and 2016, is being investigated for allegedly receiving bribes from scandal-hit Brazilian company Odebrecht in return for awarding contracts during his tenure at the oil company.

According to an international settlement reached in December 2016, Odebrecht admitted to having paid $788mn in bribes in exchange for business in 12 countries across Latin America and Africa from 2001-2016. That includes almost $10.5mn paid to unidentified Mexican government officials to secure public works contracts from 2010-2014.

The settlement specifically refers to a $6mn bribe, paid between December 2013 and late 2014, to a "high-level official of a Mexican state-owned and state-controlled company" for assisting Odebrecht with winning a project.

"If he received $10mn, then they will have to prove it is in his account," Coello said.

While the Odebrecht investigations across Latin America have seen high-level government officials land in jail in other countries, no high-profile arrests or convictions have been made in Mexico.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has pledged a crack-down on corruption and the results of a fresh investigation into the Odebrecht scandal are expected within a couple of months.