Paraguay’s Senate voted on Friday to remove President Santiago Peña from office over the collapse of Ueno Bank, and he was placed under house arrest hours later.
All 44 senators present voted for his removal, with one senator absent. Vice President Pedro Alliana was sworn in as president soon after, to serve the remainder of Peña’s term, which runs until August 2028.
Peña had announced his resignation on Thursday, after the central bank seized Ueno Bank earlier in the week and froze the accounts of nearly three million customers — almost half of the country’s population of 6.1 million. Lawmakers pressed ahead with impeachment anyway, a step that strips him of the lifetime Senate seat and parliamentary immunity granted to former presidents.
The Attorney General has opened three criminal investigations into the bank’s collapse, covering the supervision of Ueno Bank, the placement of public funds there, and the actions of state institutions. Prosecutors ordered Peña held at his home on suspicion of breach of trust until he appears before their economic crimes unit on Saturday.
Lawmakers accused Peña of using his political influence to steer hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds into Ueno Bank while regulators overlooked risky lending to companies linked to the bank’s owners. Peña has denied wrongdoing. According to the Associated Press, Ueno had accumulated more than $800 million in public funds, including around $355 million from the state pension fund. The central bank found the bank’s solvency ratio had fallen below 50 percent of the required minimum.
Peña, 47, took office in August 2023 for a five-year term. He is the second Paraguayan president to be removed through impeachment since the end of General Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship in 1989.
Source: CNN
