"THE CASH BEFORE THE KILLING - Newly Released Documents Reveal International Funding Trail Preceding the Murder of Berta Cáceres", 23 June 2022

...Two years earlier, the Dutch-state-owned bank FMO had signed on to finance the controversial Honduran Agua Zarca dam project. Led by...DESA...

A trove of Dutch and U.S. legal and financial documents shared with The Intercept reveal, for the first time, the flow of international funding in the days leading up to March 2, 2016, when a hit squad broke into Cáceres’s house and killed her. The bank provided the documents to two Dutch human rights lawyers, Wout Albers and Ron Rosenhart Rodriguez, who have spent the past two years representing Cáceres’s family and COPINH, the organization she co-founded, in a civil lawsuit that seeks to hold FMO accountable for its role in the Agua Zarca project...

Castillo, who was convicted of being a co-collaborator in Cáceres’s killing...held leadership positions and financial stakes in several companies beyond DESA. These included PEMSA, a Panamanian shell company with anonymous shareholders, and CONCASA, a concrete company...His business partner, Atala, is a member of the powerful Atala Zablah family...

It was Atala who directed the $1.7 million payment to...CONCASA...Castillo...texted the head of the hit squad that payment was coming...

Less than 48 hours later, Berta Cáceres was dead.

...FMO spokesperson Monica Beek wrote in a statement: “In view of the legal proceedings that COPINH has started, a response belongs primarily within the framework of a careful judicial process, and not now, selectively and without context”...

On February 27, 2014, FMO...agreed to loan $20,000,000 to finance the Agua Zarca project. Under the same agreement, another $24,400,000 would come from CABEI...

As a part of the loan agreement, FMO and CABEI agreed to have their money transferred to DESA through a third-party offshore account with Deutsche Bank...

“FMO financed a company whose CEO has now been found guilty of being involved in murder,” read a statement published on the bank’s website. “We are devastated by this. In hindsight, we wish we would never have invested in the Agua Zarca project.”

...FMO ended up sending millions of dollars to CONCASA...

FMO declined to elaborate on these transactions...

...[T]he documents raise substantial questions about whether some of the loan money actually went toward the dam project, and that they revealed “severe negligence from the banks to monitor how their loan was spent on the other”...

Deutsche Bank did not answer repeated calls from The Intercept seeking comment...