Word: costa
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...homesick for the States or bored with this life. Costa Rica is a lovely country. Great weather...
...speaker is Financier Robert Lee Vesco, who last week gave a rare telephone interview to TIME Correspondent Bernard Diederich. His sentiments are understandable: if the U.S. can get him extradited from Costa Rica, to which he fled in 1972, he will face trial on four indictments. The latest, returned in mid-January, charges Vesco and six associates with selling stocks held by mutual funds that were managed by I.O.S. Ltd.-the investment complex once controlled by Bernard Cornfeld-and then investing more than $100 million of the proceeds "for their own use and benefit" in corporations they controlled. Some...
...happens that $60 million is the most common estimate of how much money Vesco has pumped into the Costa Rican economy, most of it through the purchase of government bonds. Vesco will not say what else he owns; he is reputed to have invested heavily in industry, agriculture and real estate and to own the tallest office building in the capital city of San José, along with various restaurants, a coffee plantation and interests in newspapers and radio-TV stations. He is known to have sunk more than $2 million into a holding company called San Crist...
...politicians in opposition to the government of Figueres' successor, Daniel Oduber. Mario Echandi, who served as President from 1958 to 1962, has accused the government on television of granting special favors to Vesco and his associates and enlisting them to reap windfall profits in a deal with Costa Rica's national petroleum refinery...
...many Costa Ricans feel Vesco has become too important to the country's tiny economy to be kicked out. "To extradite him," sighs an opposition politician, "would mean the extradition of his money too." Indeed, in 1974, under Figueres, Costa Rica rewrote its extradition law to allow the government to veto an extradition demand before it ever reaches the courts. That new statute is popularly known as the "Vesco...