It took the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti to expose the rot in the world's charities. Well-meaning people and their governments donated about $12 billion dollars of emergency aid,
virtually none of which reached individual Haitians. The funds that were delivered went mostly to enrich the donor countries' government agencies, aid agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGO), and the vast majority of the pledged funds were never delivered at all. Some of this disappeared money was embezzled. Two criminal cases in 2015 give a glimpse into the use of NGOs by criminal networks to launder embezzled aid money.
Aid, Mediterranean styleRafael Blasco, one of Spain's longest-lived and most indestructible politicians, became the first person to serve time for stealing Haitian reconstruction funds when he began a six-and-a-half-year
prison sentence on June 15, 2015 for committing embezzlement of public funds, administrative prevarication, and forgery while he was the Director of the Aid Ministry in Valencia's regional government. Although the English-language press ignored this news, in Spain, the "Aid Case" was a major scandal that the media followed for three years, until the Spanish Supreme Court denied Blasco's final appeal for clemency in May 2015.
According to a Valencia High Court and the Spanish Supreme Court, Blasco received his sentence for running a criminal ring that
had syphoned off all but 3 percent of a $2 million aid package that should have brought water and sustainable food to two poor rural areas of Nicaragua. This was only one part of the three-part Aid Case, which involved a total of $10 million and irregularities in 30 humanitarian projects in Central America and the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Another important part of the Aid Case was the planned construction of a hospital in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake for $5.1 million, but it turned out that there was sufficient evidence in the Nicaragua part to convict Blasco.
Comment: See also: Snow causes chaos in China as millions head home for Lunar New Year