Paraguay, Senate removes and has President Peña arrested

Paraguay’s Senate voted 44 to 0 to remove President Santiago Peña, found guilty of mismanagement in connection with the collapse of digital bank Ueno. The verdict came despite the resignation Peña himself had submitted the day before: the Senate nonetheless proceeded with the impeachment, and a few hours after the removal the now former president was placed under house arrest. French newspaper Le Monde confirms that 44 senators voted for the removal, in a session that brought a rapid end to an institutional crisis that had developed over just a few days.

Vice President Pedro Alliana, 52, was appointed interim president in his place. The handover comes at the end of an affair that has overwhelmed the Paraguayan executive and which, for now, remains closely tied to the fate of one of the country’s leading digital financial institutions.

The collapse of Ueno Bank left more than half of Paraguay’s population without access to their savings, affecting around three million depositors. It is this collapse that led prosecutors to open three separate criminal proceedings against Peña and other former officials linked to the banking crisis, proceedings that then fed into the impeachment process which ended with the president’s removal.

After the Senate vote, police and the public prosecutor’s office served Peña with an arrest warrant directly at his home in Asunción. According to Paraguayan newspaper ABC Color, the former president was expected at the prosecutor’s office at 11 a.m. on November 7. The investigation cited by the same outlet concerns initial allegations of breach of trust, influence peddling and self-dealing management, all linked to the handling of the Ueno Bank crisis.

Peña commented on his removal in a public statement. According to Internazionale, citing a Reuters dispatch, the former president said: “It was never my intention to betray the trust you placed in me” (transl. from English).

The affair marks the early end of a presidential term brought down by the collapse of a single bank, which affected millions of account holders and led to the opening of three separate criminal proceedings against the former head of state and other officials. The new interim president, Alliana, now inherits both the management of the financial crisis and the judicial follow-up to the Ueno Bank investigation, while three million depositors remain without access to their savings.