Antonio Carbone, Canadian casino businessman puts the blame for his imprisonment on his former business partners. The mogul spent the last two years in a prison located in the Dominican Republic after he was placed there without a trial or any prospects of releasing.
The Dominican Republic is notoriously known for its shady laws and its corrupt judicial system, so for him to be imprisoned in that country, was not a good course of events. Carbone is a casino executive of a Toronto-area based venue and he claims that the whole scheme was a part of a bigger plan to take control of a casino venue he co-founded with his brother Francesco Carbone.
The Dream Casino group is a multi-million-dollar venture located in the Caribbean which has many series of lawsuits and counter-suits related to the ownership and control of the company. Antonio Carbone is still in prison although he was granted a bail. The public expected him to be freed in January, but a judge decided that Carbone has to continue being held under a preventive detention order. This will keep him in the Dominican Republic at least for the foreseeable future.
Recently the Canadian businessman claimed that he was unfairly denied a bail hearing for the last two years and that he considers this a part of a bigger conspiracy against him, which aims to keep him removed from the casino project at all costs. Isidro Vasquez Pena, the former lead investigator in the case was arrested and charged with receiving a bribe of $125,000 during another case, which raises questions about his reliability as an unbiased investigator.
Carbone was accused of attempted murder during the firebombing of a 1999 Jaguar Vanden Plas which belonged to Fernando Baez, who was his former partner at the time. This happened in the early hours of the 1st of December 2014 and the casino mogul was held in preventive custody in the prison in San Pedro, which is located some 100 kilometers west of Punta Cana. The controversy in the whole situation was that crucial details of the case, which is led by the Santo Domingo attorney, are based on factual errors.
The evidence in the case against Carbone appears to be contradicted by other evidence, as well as the words of a key witness. This makes it unclear whether the case has any ground and strength. Baez continues giving different statements to the district attorney regarding the car bombing he survived. Antonio Carbone and his family have made numerous attempts to reach out to Global Affairs Canada to intervene on his behalf, but he is still locked away without having the chance to see his family and loved ones.
