Archive for December 3rd, 2008
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008
Costa Rican President Oscar Arias is in Singapore to start talks on a bilateral free trade agreement.
The accord will cover investment, services, telecommunications and tourism, among other areas.
Arias has long lobbied for greater economic ties with Asia. He hopes the trade accord will encourage Singapore to invest in and develop Costa Rica’s Caribbean ports.
The president on Tuesday met with Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong.
Singapore has trade agreements with Chile, Peru and Panama.
Costa Rican exports to Singapore totaled $31.5 million and imports reached $26.4 million in 2007.
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Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008
Costa Rica’s intelligence chief quit on Tuesday as police probed his deputy’s possible involvement in an identity theft
scam that broke into a database in order to drain personal bank accounts.
Department of Intelligence and Security head Roberto Solorzano resigned two weeks after police raided his department’s offices
over a nearly $400,000 bank fraud that affected around a dozen people, the government said.
Solorzano is not under suspicion, but deputy intelligence chief Roberto Guillen may have used his own password to a personal information database to create false identity cards that let fraudsters obtain checkbooks, public prosecutor Miguel Angel Navarro said. “The password assigned to Mr. Guillen was used to obtain personal information that was used to falsify ID cards that were then used to obtain personal checks from banks,” Navarro said.
The protected personal data was held online by Costa Rican information collection company Datum, Navarro said. Guillen, who was suspended from his post after the Nov. 19 raid, had been assigned a password to Datum’s website for investigative purposes, he said.
The scam is an embarrassment for Costa Rica, which likes to see itself as cleaner than its crime-ridden and often corrupt Central American neighbors, despite a string of corruption scandals in recent years involving former presidents. Solorzano acknowledged in his resignation letter that there had been negligence in security management, the government said in a statement.
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Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008
An online gambling site that operates out of a shopping mall in Costa Rica has been embroiled in a cheating scandal, according to an investigation by the daily Washington Post and the TV program, 60 Minutes.
AbsolutePoker was forced to refund $1.6 million to cheated players after one gambler grew suspicious of a player who couldn’t seem to lose. After calculating that the man was winning at a rate 15 standard deviations above the normal rate, the suspicious gambler traced the player’s IP number back to a computer owned by AbsolutePoker. The cheater was allegedly an inside man.
A subsidiary of AbsolutePoker, UltimateBet is also now accused of cheating about $20 million from its players. The alleged offenders include UltimateBet employees.
The sites are licensed by the Kahnawáke Mohawk reservation, which did not return a request for comment. AbsolutePoker also did not return a request for comment.
The Kahnawáke Gaming Commission has fined AbsolutePoker and UltimateBet a combined $2 million for the cheating incidents, but would not disclose the name of the alleged inside man who cheated them, according to the Post.
AbsolutePoker told the Post that it fired the cheater, who m they described as a consultant in the Costa Rica headquarters, in Oct 2007, but did not turn him over to the authorities. UltimateBet has begun refunding the $20 million it owes to cheated players.
The online gambling industry generates about $18 billion a year, and the sites are banned in the United States.
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Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008
Over 36,000 people have been affected by heavy rains and severe floods in Panama and Costa Rica since late November, the International Red Cross said Tuesday as it launched an appeal for aid funds.
“Many areas are facing blackouts and lack of water. More than 45 indigenous communities in remote coastal areas are surrounded by water and can only be reached by helicopter, which has proved challenging due to the non-stop rains,” said the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. (more…)
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Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008
The Superintendent General of Finances (SUGEF) intends to pass a bill on December 18th highly limiting the operation of offshore banks in Costa rica. Such banks are considered to be foreign owned banks existing in Costa Rica that license their banking to a Costa Rican organization. Until now, these banks enjoyed a large amount of freedom in setting their own interest rates and were not obligated to pay a large tax to the Banco Central de Costa Rica, as national banks are.
The economic authorities voted to restrict the operational activities of offshore banks as they cannot supervise or oversee their monetary control. Currently Costa Rica has six offshore banks operating in Costa Rica of which Scotia Bank and BAC are two of the biggest. (more…)
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