Puerto Rico has logged more than 4,000 confirmed cases of infection with the Chikungunya virus this year, the Health Department said Wednesday.
Lab tests confirmed 118 new cases during the Nov. 12-Dec. 9 period, chief epidemiologist Brenda Rivera Garcia said, which brought the total to 4,185, pending data for the rest of December.
"Most of the cases confirmed in this report are in the western area of the island," she said in a statement. "It is important that residents in this region's municipalities take steps to protect themselves and to eradicate mosquito breeding sites both around houses and work areas."
Chikungunya, like dengue fever, is spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito.
Rivera Garcia urged residents to continue using insect repellants and wearing clothes that limit exposure to mosquito bites.
The Chikungunya virus is responsible for five deaths on the island this year, according to the Puerto Rico Health Department.
Puerto Rican authorities declared a Chikungunya epidemic in July.
First detected in Africa in the 1950s, Chikungunya did not appear in the Americas until 2013. There is no vaccine for the virus. EFE
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Unsolved Killing but One of Puerto Rico Bank's Woes
New York Times - Dec 27, 2014
The bank's misfortune in Puerto Rico is the story of savvy financiers and investors from the mainland United States who collided with an island roiled by years of recession and violence. As it tries to come back from a mortgage scandal, Doral has been caught ...
Is FBI raid tied to ex-Greenville bank exec killing?
Greenville News - Dec 24, 2014
FBI agents in Puerto Rico raided the headquarters of Doral Bank and while authorities declined to provide details, they didn't rule out that the search was related to the investigation into the June 2011 killing of former Greenville bank executive Maurice ...
Puerto Rico's population falls to 3.5 mn
GlobalPost - Dec 24, 2014
San Juan, Dec 24 (EFE).- Puerto Rico's population has fallen to just over 3.5 million, the island's Statistics Institute said, citing U.S. Census figures. The figures show that Puerto Rico was home to 3,548,397 people as of early July. Puerto Rico's populatin ...
Puerto Rico's population falls to 3.5 mn
La prensa - Dec 24, 2014
The figures show that Puerto Rico was home to 3,548,397 people as of early July. Puerto Rico'spopulatin peaked on July 1, 2004, at 3,826,878, the U.S. Census figures show. The island's population has fallen by 7.3 percent over the past 10 years, or at about ...
FBI Raids Office of Puerto Rico-Based Doral Bank Following Regulatory Struggles
<a href="http://ticklethewire.com" rel="nofollow">ticklethewire.com</a> - Dec 24, 2014
The FBI raided the Puerto Rico headquarters of Doral Bank in search of evidence related to “several ongoing investigations” Tuesday following questions about the lender's ability to meet regulatory mandates, Bloomberg reports. The FBI confirmed it collected ...
Puerto Rico picks developer for former naval site
Stars and Stripes - Dec 23, 2014
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Puerto Rico's government has chosen a U.S. real estate company to redevelop an abandoned U.S. naval station on the island's eastern coast. The Economic Development Department announced in a news release Monday that ...
FBI Searches Doral Financial's Offices in Puerto Rico
New York Times - Dec 23, 2014
Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Tuesday raided the offices of Doral Financial in San Juan, Puerto Rico, as part of an investigation involving the struggling bank. After news of the raid, trading in Doral shares was halted on Tuesday morning.
FBI Arrives At Doral Financial HQ With Warrants
ValueWalk - Dec 23, 2014
The San Juan, Puerto Rico based lender's legal troubles continue as FBI searches offices today. At around 8:15 a.m. on Tuesday, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation entered the home offices of the beleaguered bank in order to collect documents ...
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Roosevelt Roads U.S. naval station
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| Puerto Rico The Department of Economic Development and Commerce photo |
The Associated Press
Published: December 24, 2014
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Puerto Rico's government has chosen a U.S. real estate company to redevelop an abandoned U.S. naval station on the island's eastern coast.
The Economic Development Department announced in a news release Monday that Virginia-based Clark Realty Capital is expected to invest $3.2 billion as part of a 30-year project that would include hotels, offices, residences, schools and a cruise ship port. The project is expected to generate 28,000 jobs over the length of the project.
The department said it expects to finalize the deal by June 2015.
The former Roosevelt Roads U.S. naval station closed in 2004 after the military stopped using the nearby island of Vieques as a bombing range. Attempts to redevelop the site have been stalled in part because of the island's sluggish economy.
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SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Federal authorities said Tuesday they have dismantled a ring that imported tons of drugs from South America and invested most of the billion-dollar proceeds in construction projects across Puerto Rico.
Among the 17 suspects facing drug-trafficking and money-laundering charges are local businessmen and lawyers, according to U.S. Attorney Rosa Emilia Rodriguez.
The suspected leader of the group, Carlos Morales Davila, had been arrested in 2011 and ran the organization from prison, where he is currently serving a 12-year sentence, said Pedro Janer, acting special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Caribbean division.
Janer said he believes the organization has been dismantled with the 17 arrest warrants issued Tuesday following a federal grand jury indictment. Some of the suspects were already in prison while others were arrested in Puerto Rico, officials said.
The group is suspected of transporting large amounts of cocaine and heroin from South America to Puerto Rico since at least 2008, using the nearby island of Vieques as the entry point, Rodriguez said. The suspects are accused of using the commercial ferry from Vieques to Puerto Rico to help transport the drugs, she said.
Rodriguez said the organization invested the money in properties including 65 homes, 15 cars and several luxury boats. A portion of the money also financed construction of a building for a local university, with a developer among the suspects charged, she said.
Rodriguez said a court will ultimately decide what happens to those properties.
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The home office of Doral (DRL) Bank, the San Juan, Puerto Rico-based lender struggling to meet regulatory mandates, was raided by the FBI in a search for evidence related to “several ongoing investigations,” the agency said.
Federal Bureau of Investigation agents entered the bank’s offices about 8:15 a.m. in San Juan to collect information including computers and documents, said Special Agent Moises Quinones. He declined to comment further on the subject of the probes.
Doral Bank is part of San Juan-based Doral Financial Corp., which in July was trying to sell off parts of its business to maintain compliance with capital requirements, according to people familiar with the plan who asked not to be identified because the information was private.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has downgraded Doral from an earlier finding of “undercapitalized,” the company said in a regulatory filing in October. It was told to “immediately” increase the bank’s capital to the minimums required in a 2012 consent order or submit a contingency plan for a sale, merger or liquidation, according to the filing.
This month, the company said it had received a notice from NYSE Regulation Inc. that it may be deemed non-compliant with listing standards unless it holds an annual meeting for 2014 by year-end.
After falling as much as 36 percent today in trading in New York, Doral closed down 16 percent at $3.40.
Miriam Warren, a spokeswoman for Doral, confirmed that investigators “have pursued the collection of certain information at the main offices of our institution.”
The bank is cooperating fully with law enforcement and “we look forward to sharing more on the focus of the investigation as we learn more,” she said in a statement.
The bank’s commercial operations haven’t been affected, she said.
In a press conference today, Puerto Rico U.S. Attorney Rosa Emilia Rodriguez-Velez said the Doral search was being conducted by the white-collar crime unit regarding a federal offense. However, she said she wouldn’t exclude the possibility that the probe may also relate to the 2011 murder of a Doral executive, Maurice Spagnoletti, according to a radio broadcast of the news conference.
Spagnoletti, executive vice president of mortgage and banking operations at Doral, was shot dead in June 2011 on a highway in San Juan while driving home from work, according to the Associated Press.
Doral Financial, the holding company for Puerto Rico’s second-largest lender, has been in a legal dispute with the commonwealth’s treasury department over whether it is entitled to a $229.9 milliontax refund. A judge in San Juan ruled in October in favor of Doral. Puerto Rico Treasury Secretary Melba Acosta Febo said the commonwealth would appeal.
To contact the reporter on this story: Alexander Lopez in San Juan, Puerto Rico; Christie Smythe in Brooklyn at csmythe1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael Hytha at mhytha@bloomberg.net Andrew Dunn, Charles Carter
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Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Tuesday raided the offices of Doral Financial in San Juan, Puerto Rico, as part of an investigation involving the struggling bank.
After news of the raid, trading in Doral shares was halted on Tuesday morning. When trading resumed, the shares tumbled, closing the day down more than 16 percent to $3.40. Doral’s share price has fallen more than 78 percent this year.
A spokesman for the bank said in a statement that “Doral is cooperating fully with law enforcement authorities.”
For a relatively small bank, Doral has attracted a great deal of government scrutiny and criticism over the years. In June 2011, one of its top executives, Maurice Spagnoletti, was fatally shot while driving on a major highway in San Juan. Federal authorities in Puerto Rico have said that solving the crime is one of their priorities.
An F.B.I. spokesman declined to comment or whether the raid was related to the bureau’s investigation into the killing of Mr. Spagnoletti, who had been at the bank only a few months.
But at a news conference on Tuesday, the United States attorney for Puerto Rico, Rosa Emilia Rodríguez-Vélez, would not rule out the possibility that the search might be related to that investigation. For several hours on Tuesday morning, eight agents from the F.B.I.’s white-collar crime unit inspected the offices of the bank’s large glass building in San Juan.
This year, a dispute between Doral and the commonwealth government has raised concerns among federal banking regulators and even members of Congress.
With its business in Puerto Rico struggling from high unemployment and sinking property values there, Doral has been counting on a roughly $230 million tax refund deal from the island’s government.
But commonwealth officials said this year that the tax deal, negotiated by a previous administration, was invalid, setting off concern among banking regulators about Doral’s capital levels. In October, a local court ruled that the tax deal should stand. The government has appealed.
Doral’s struggles reflect how a relentless recession in Puerto Rico is squeezing the island’s businesses, government and a banking system that some say has too many competing institutions.
Supporters of Doral say the Puerto Rican government is unfairly trying to cope with its own serious financial problems by backing out of the tax agreement. The tax dispute, those supporters say, raises questions about whether Puerto Rico can be trusted to honor its debts. It is a particularly delicate question as the government seeks to continue to borrow in the municipal bond market to keep financing its operations.
Government officials have argued that Doral had not demonstrated that it had overpaid its taxes enough to warrant the refund.
Doral has hired lobbyists in Washington, and a top litigation firm, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, to argue its case in court in Puerto Rico. Some of Doral’s employees recently went on the radio pleading with the governor to stop “the attacks” on the bank. Some members of Congress have written to the Puerto Rican government inquiring about the reason for nullifying the 2012 tax agreement.
The bank, meanwhile, has been selling assets to raise cash, as federal regulators seek assurances that Doral is adequately capitalized.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ordered the bank to submit a capital restoration plan, and plans for a potential liquidation or sale. The bank said this month that it had received notice from the F.D.I.C. that its capital restoration plan was inadequate and must be resubmitted.
Last week, Doral said in a securities filing that the bank could run afoul of the New York Stock Exchange’s listing rules because it did not hold an annual meeting in 2014.
The F.B.I. raid on Tuesday was not the first time Doral had drawn the scrutiny of white-collar investigators.
After the financial crisis, the bank and its investors were rocked by a costly fraud involving improperly valued mortgage investments. One of the bank’s former executives was sent to prison in connection with the fraud. Since then, the bank has replaced much of its senior management and has worked to expand its business on the mainland United States.
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SAN JUAN, P.R. — It was near the evening rush hour when the bank executive drove his black Lexus along the four-lane highway here. Only a few minutes from the banker’s beachfront home, someone opened fire, shattering his car windows and hitting him several times.
The 57-year-old executive at Doral Financial — one of Puerto Rico’s biggest mortgage lenders and a onetime Wall Street darling — was found dead at the scene by the police.
More than three years later, the mysterious death of the banker, Maurice Spagnoletti, continues to fuel conspiracy theories in San Juan banking circles and unnerve international investors.
The killing is one of many troubles that have shaken the bank in recent years as it tries to step back from the brink of a financial disaster. The investigation into the June 2011 shooting is incomplete, darkening a cloud that was already hanging over the bank.
On Tuesday, agents from the white-collar-crime unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the main offices of Doral here. It is unclear what the subject of the search was, but at a news conference that day, the United States attorney for Puerto Rico, Rosa Emilia Rodríguez-Vélez, would not rule out the possibility that the search might relate to the shooting investigation.
The bank’s misfortune in Puerto Rico is the story of savvy financiers and investors from the mainland United States who collided with an island roiled by years of recession and violence. As it tries to come back from a mortgage scandal, Doral has been caught up in an increasingly bitter battle among Puerto Rico’s government, industries and banks to claim a piece of a shrinking economy.
Yet the bank’s problems are not entirely the fault of the local economy. Its management has also caused concerns among regulators about oversight of the bank and its capital levels.
Doral’s struggle is a vivid example of a broad reckoning in Puerto Rico, where job losses and a declining population are squeezing the weakest links in the island’s banking system and pressuring the government to make deep cuts.
The shakeout is reverberating, too, in the mainland United States, where many analysts and investors expect the federal government will have to spend billions of dollars propping up Puerto Rico’s government and some of its financial institutions.
After eight consecutive years of losses, Doral is now fighting the Puerto Rico government over a $230 million tax refund that the bank is counting on. Federal banking regulators have ordered Doral to submit a contingency plan for a possible liquidation in case efforts to bolster its capital fall short.
Founded in 1972, Doral is a relative newcomer to the island, where banking institutions like Popular date back to the 19th century. Still, Doral found a niche as a mortgage lender. And by 2005, as housing boomed, the bank’s share price was climbing fast.
Its successes, however, crumbled when Doral was rocked by extensive fraud perpetrated, federal prosecutors said, by a former bank treasurer, Mario Levis, known as Sammy.
Doral sold many of the mortgages it originated, but kept a portion of the interest payments, called interest-only strips, that were paid by homeowners. As the mortgage market started to sour, Mr. Levis improperly valued the strips, misleading the bank’s investors, according to prosecutors.
The scheme came undone, and Doral’s share price plummeted. In 2010, Mr. Levis was convicted of securities fraud and sentenced to five years in prison. In need of new leadership, Doral’s board asked Glen R. Wakeman, the head of General Electric’s finance unit in Latin America, to become chief executive.
Mr. Wakeman agreed, seeing an opportunity to clean up Doral after the fraud and expand onto the mainland, according to a person close to the bank’s leadership, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
But first, Doral desperately needed capital. Mr. Wakeman made pitches to over 100 potential investors and was turned down by all but three. Some laughed and walked out of the room, the person said.
Finally, a group of Wall Street investors — including Goldman Sachs and the hedge funds Perry Capital and Marathon Asset Management — agreed to buy nearly all of Doral’s shares. Mr. Wakeman also invested several million dollars of his own money.
The investors were betting that Doral could acquire the weakest links in Puerto Rico’s overstuffed banking system.
But by then the economy was showing signs of strain. One day, not long after he started, Mr. Wakeman noticed fruit baskets from local developers piling up on his secretary’s desk.
The fruit baskets were meant to welcome Mr. Wakeman to the island, but the banker was suspicious, according to the person. After reviewing the bank’s construction loans and driving around the island to review building projects, he decided to cut off most of its financing to developers.
Doral raised interest rates on the builders, declined to renew their loans, took over failed projects and sold the homes at steep discounts. The bank also stopped much of its lending to other businesses like doctor’s offices, dentists and retailers.
Some residents blamed Doral for helping tip the island’s economy into a free fall, the person close to the bank’s leadership said. Angry developers approached Mr. Wakeman on the beach and at restaurants.
At the same time that Doral was liquidating hundreds of millions of construction loans in Puerto Rico, it was investing in a new operation in New York that was buying slices of corporate debt from large Wall Street lenders. The moves were intended to help the bank survive the recession.
But to some people on the island, it had the appearance of abandoning Puerto Rico.
As part of his strategy to rehabilitate Doral, Mr. Wakeman also hired dozens of bankers from the mainland and rival Puerto Rico banks.
One new recruit was Mr. Spagnoletti, who had worked in community banks and large regional banks in New Jersey, Indiana and South Carolina for more than two decades.
Mr. Spagnoletti inspired intense loyalty, sometimes inviting colleagues to his house for dinners. But he was not afraid to fire people and was a stickler about the rules, even when pressured to loosen lending standards, his former colleagues said.
“He was your classic, old-time, by-the-book banker,” said David Frances, who worked with Mr. Spagnoletti at the South Financial Group in South Carolina.
Mr. Spagnoletti joined Doral in late 2010 as an executive vice president for mortgage and banking operations, first working at its office in New York and then traveling back and forth between his home in New Jersey and a condominium in San Juan. Gary Howlett, who had worked with Mr. Spagnoletti at Fifth Third Bank in Indiana, said that his friend was attracted to the job at Doral because he was given a great deal of responsibility and autonomy. “He saw it as a big challenge,” Mr. Howlett said.
It was 7:21 p.m. on June 15, 2011, when the Puerto Rico police responded to a 911 call about a shooting on a main highway leading to the center of San Juan.
Mr. Spagnoletti’s Lexus had rolled to a stop on the grass along the side of the road. The police recovered nine shell casings at the scene, according to the police report.
The shooting was “traumatic” for the bank’s employees, a person close to Doral said. It was particularly unnerving, this person said, because it occurred in a year when rampant murders in Puerto Rico were shaking the public’s sense of safety.
Lt. Ferdinand Acosta, head of the Puerto Rico Police Department’s major crimes unit, which is assisting the F.B.I. with the Spagnoletti case, said he did not believe the banker’s killing was a mistake.
“He was singled out,” he said in a recent interview.
This year, there have been 663 killings in Puerto Rico as of last Friday, down from 1,164 in 2011, when Mr. Spagnoletti was killed.
Since the shooting, Mr. Wakeman and other top executives have moved their offices to Miami from San Juan, citing the bank’s growth in the United States. The move is not related to safety concerns, a person close to the bank said.
While Doral is now focusing on the mainland, one of its most valuable assets remains in Puerto Rico: the $230 million tax refund.
The tax deal was unusual, government officials say, because Puerto Rico’s former treasury secretary was hired by Doral as an executive vice president less than a year after his office approved the refund in 2012. A bank spokesman said the former treasurer, while he was in office, had recused himself from the government’s negotiations with Doral.
This spring, the Puerto Rico Treasury declared the cash refund was invalid. Government officials argued that Doral had not demonstrated that it had overpaid its taxes enough to warrant the refund.
“The government has been unfair to the bank,” said David Tomasello, whose family investment office is one of Doral’s largest shareholders. “The two sides should come to agreement and put this behind them.”
Doral hired lobbyists in Washington and a top litigation firm, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, to argue its case. Some of Doral’s employees recently went on the radio to implore the governor to stop “the attacks” on the bank.
Doral won the first round of its legal dispute in October, when a commonwealth court ruled that the tax refund was valid. Puerto Rico’s Treasury has appealed.
The F.B.I. has declined to comment on the target of its raid on Tuesday. A person briefed on the matter said the search warrant covered information from 2008 to 2011 and involved certain vendors of the bank.
Goldman Sachs and the large hedge funds have lost most of their investments in Doral, a person briefed on the investment said. But Mr. Tomasello started buying shares this spring and recently increased his stake, even as the stock price continued to slip. He said he was not trying to time his purchases at the bottom because he viewed Doral as a long-term investment.
“In Puerto Rico,” he said, “the bottom is the bottom of the ocean.”
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MIAMI (AP) -- Just starting a five-year sentence for illegally re-entering the United States, George Lewis stared at the officers staring back at him at Miami's federal detention center and considered whether he'd risk getting on another smuggler's boat - a chance that soaring numbers of Caribbean islanders are taking - once he's deported again....
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