$18 million bond set for Ecuadorean official in Miami money-laundering case
A former senior Ecuadorean official accused of pocketing millions in bribes and moving the money to South Florida won’t have to stay behind bars as he awaits trial in Miami federal court.
But his bond — totaling $18 million — is going to cost him dearly.
Carlos Polit Faggioni, Ecuador’s ex-comptroller who faces arraignment on Wednesday, has to put up $1.2 million of his own money as part of his bond package. The money will go to his bail bondsman, and it’s not refundable.
If he can come up with the money and show that it’s clean, the 72-year-old Polit will regain his freedom at least until trial under a package approved by Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Becerra on Friday. Becerra imposed the high bond, which is also secured with properties owned by Polit’s family members in South Florida, after prosecutors proposed bail of $11 million.
Initially, they had wanted to detain him because they considered Polit, who has dual U.S.-Ecuadorean citizenship, a risk of flight. But his defense attorney, Fernando Tamayo, pushed for bail.
Since his arrest on money-laundering charges a week ago, Polit has been held at the Federal Detention Center. He previously lived in a high-rise condo along the Miami River, and he also owns three other real estate properties in Miami-Dade County.
Astronomically high bonds are not uncommon in the South Florida annals of fraud, corruption and money-laundering cases, especially those involving government officials and business people from Latin America.
Last August, a Venezuelan businessman accused of stealing a fortune from oil and food contracts in Venezuela had to secure a $50 million bond with luxury properties in South Florida and a vast sum of money from his Swiss bank account.
Naman Wakil, who was born in Syria before immigrating to Venezuela and later settling in Miami, had to complete the transfer of $21.3 million from his Swiss bank account to the federal court registry in Miami. Meanwhile, federal authorities placed liens on more than a dozen properties, a plane, a yacht and local bank accounts to cover the balance for bail.
In Ecuador, Polit was tried and convicted of extorting a Brazilian engineering contractor, Odebrecht S.A., in absentia because he had left for Miami before the 2018 trial in his native country. In his job as comptroller, Polit had been tasked to protect Ecuador’s government from public corruption and misuse of funds.
According to his indictment, Polit is accused of conspiring with a relative, an Odebrecht executive and an Ecuadorean businessman in transferring ill-gotten bribery payments from the engineering firm through a series of shell companies and bank accounts in South Florida between 2010 and 2017.
The indictment says Polit “solicited and received bribe payments” from the Odebrecht senior manager “in exchange for using his official position and influence as comptroller of Ecuador to prevent the imposition of large fines on Odebrecht by the comptroller’s office relating to Odebrecht’s construction projects in Ecuador.”
Polit was paid $8 million by the unidentified executive “to influence official actions by the Ecuador comptroller’s office in order to benefit Odebrecht and its business in Ecuador,” according to the indictment filed by prosecutors Michael Berger and Alexander Kramer.
Polit told the Odebrecht executive that he used another co-conspirator, an unnamed relative, “to make the cash ‘disappear,’ ” the indictment says.
The case, probed by Homeland Security Investigations, is built upon an electronic trail of financial records and cooperating witnesses.
Three years ago, McClatchy-Miami Herald and other news media collaborated on an investigative project that zeroed in on Odebrecht’s parallel off-books accounting system. Leaked documents showed links between Polit’s Miami-based son, John Christopher Polit, and a U.S. shell company, Ventures Overseas LLC, which became a pass-through for the alleged bribery payments by Odebrecht.
John Polit, a former securities broker in Miami, was also convicted in Ecuador of being an accomplice in connection with his father’s case. But his conviction in Ecuador was overturned in 2020, and he has not been charged in his father’s federal case in Miami.
