“Moreno is a corrupt man, but what he has done is a crime that humanity will never forget,” the former leader said.
“Lenín Moreno was Correa’s candidate,” Richard Lapper, Associate Fellow at Chatham House’s U.S. and the Americas Programme, told CBS News of the now-rivals. The left-wing leader was unable to run in Ecuador’s 2017 elections because of the country’s term limits, so he campaigned for Moreno, who was his one-time vice president.
As tensions grew in Ecuador between Correa and Moreno supporters over the shift, a large trove of hacked documents, dubbed the “INA Papers,” was leaked on the internet. It included material belonging to Moreno which some people believe shows he profited from corrupt business dealings. WikiLeaks tweeted a link to the papers, but denied having anything to do with their publication, the Daily Beast reported.
On Thursday, Correa tweeted: “Julian Assange was expelled from the Ecuadorian Embassy for exposing Pres. Lenin Moreno’s corruption in the #INAPapers.”
His tweet included bank details that he alleged were a secret account used by Moreno for money laundering.