SANTO DOMINGO. – The ex-National District prosecutor (1006-1997) spoke of his controversial 12 months in that post during president Leonel Fernandez’s first term in office (1996-2000), remembered as the chief executive’s most questioned measure which analysts view as yet another example of Government corruption.

Guillermo Moreno said this morning that the reasons behind his dismissal were that, "I received pressures from all sides so that I discontinue investigating the fraud in the Lottery in which Frederick Marzouka was implicated,” he said, adding that the suspect was only the “tip of the iceberg."

The ex-official made reference to the episode –which in that occasion had his public dispute with the then Justice minister Abel Rodriguez del Orbe and which was ostensibly  the reason for his dismissal- remembered the case that filled newspaper headlines to then, as many others, only be forgotten.

"The Marzouka case arrived as just one more at the Ofice of the Prosecutor. He was a Haitian accused of committing a fraud against the Lottery; we received more than one hundred cases of that type per day. In the weekend, Nuria Piera presented an interview with Marzouka but I didn’t see it. Later, she was in the Office of the Prosecutor and asked if I had seen the program, I confessed to hr that I hadn’t, then, she sent the video to me with the recorded interview. When I saw it, I then knew that there were many other people involved in the case," he said.

The newspaper Listin Diario reports today that Moreno  affirmed that when the investigation began, he determined that Marzouka would decide on the winning number with a simple apparatus.

When interrogated many of those implicated blamed others and that’s how surfaced the name of Tete Antún Batlle, son of the then Lottery administration Rafael Antun and brother of the opposition PRSC party president Federico Antún Batlle. "It was evident that to be able to carry out that fraud it had to have been with the knowledge of the administration," he said, in reference to the embezzlement estimated at RD$90 million

He said, interviewed tthis morning by the prestigious editor Rafael Molina Morillo, that he began to receive pressures for him to stop. "I received pressures from all sides. ‘Leave that be, don’t go on.’ But I couldn’t remove a name that had been mentioned in a list of those investigated. I couldn’t say this one no and this one yes because the day I do that I could not go out."

Moreno remembers the moment in which he was fired, after being called to the Palace. "I was told that the President had disposed of my position."

Also investigated in the Marzouka case was colonel Pedro Julio Goico (Pepe), then captain, who later became head of ex-president Hipólito Mejía’s security detail. The Haitian was arrested but later admitted to a clinic for "health reasons" from where he "escaped" to Haiti.

Moreno was National District prosecutor after the governing PLD party took office thanks to an alliance with the PRSC.

Editor’s not: Frederick Marzouka’s last whereabouts is Brazil, where he was arrested for running an illegal gambling operation.