Global Courant 2023-05-31 11:05:55
Due to unsupported expenses, breached contracts, disappearance of assets and harmful and unjustified credits, among other causes, the Comptroller General of Accounts has filed fifty complaints in the Public Ministry against officials from various branches of the Executive, municipalities and decentralized entities. The funds committed in such expenditures are not a bicoca: Q506 million. Agile investigations are to be expected that allow those involved to be prosecuted with the same speed exhibited in other matters in which animosity is glimpsed.
The fraud of the rigged purchase of equipment for the Chimaltenango Hospital, which involves former Vice Minister Gerardo Hernández, will undoubtedly be the proof of royal water about the faithfulness and priorities of the Prosecutor’s Office. The case is serious and its procedural resolution is crucial for three reasons: the most important, because it directly hits the citizens who seek help in such a care center, built by Taiwan but presumed as an “achievement” by the government of Giammattei Falla ; if you don’t have equipment, you can’t properly care for patients. Second, because 60% of the purchase has not yet been delivered. Third, because a new judicial precedent must be set as soon as possible and not wait for eight years to pass, as happened with the “health merchants.”
The loan of Q5 million made by Ferrocarriles de Guatemala at a leonine rate of 18% is also suspicious, funds that were not going to any investment but to cover current expenses. Such an anomaly is striking, because said entity is governed by the figure of an auditor and, therefore, subject to the Presidency.
There are findings that, if they weren’t so embarrassing, could be taken as part of a bad comedy script. Unfortunately, reality is stranger than fiction. At the National Institute for Municipal Development (Infom), no one accounts for various vehicles of the institution. The auditors of the Comptroller’s Office were told that they were stolen, but there is no complaint in the PNC or the MP. As if that were not enough, Infom continues to pay the circulation tax.
In the Vice Ministry of Agricultural Health and Regulations there are Q13 million 950 thousand whose final destination is unknown. They should have been used in municipal support programs or research projects. In addition, there are three municipalities, Samayac, Suchitepéquez, and San Francisco and La Libertad, Petén, in which anomalous handling of funds was detected.
The above are only part of the results produced by the gloss of 2022. There are cases without deduction of responsibilities, such as the purchase of Russian vaccines, made in 2020, for an amount of Q614 million, paid in advance and which were delivered by fertilizers. The acquisition was handled under unwarranted secrecy. Expired doses continue to be stored in cold rooms, the cost of which continues to be paid to the treasury. Cases such as the Q122 million in cash found at the home of José Luis Benito, Jimmy Morales’s Minister of Communications, a former official who is also linked to the demolished Libramiento de Chimaltenango, continue without a response or trial in sight. There is no result regarding the deputies and ex-deputies linked to the Odebrecht case, nor has there been any expediting of the preliminary trial of deputy Jorge Luis García Silva, accused of a rigged purchase of equipment for Insivumeh. Speed or parsimony denote interests, like it or not.
A speed test of the MP against corruption
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