After 33 years, the case of the so-called $191 million ‘monument to corruption’ has been closed

Everything was great. The work, the personalities suspected of corruption and the length of the court case. After 33 years of treatment the case was definitely closed for what was called “the monument of corruption”. It concerned the construction of the hydroelectric dam of Yacyretá, the most important civil engineering work in the country for which corruption was suspected for more than 191 million pesos and whose judicial investigation began in October 1989.

The three businessmen implicated were definitively dismissed after a judgment at the end of the year by the Federal Chamber of Criminal Cassation which was not appealed by the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, they said. GlobeLiveMedia judicial sources. The measure reaches employers By Guillermo Poule, Gianfranco Rizzo there Robert Ortega.

“If there is a monument to corruption here, it is Yacyretá”, said Carlos Menem in April 1990, a few months after taking office as President of the Nation. The Yaceyretá dam is the largest civil engineering work in the country and is responsible for generating electricity. It unites Argentina from the province of Corrientes, by the Paraná river, to Paraguay. Its construction began in 1973, under the third government of Juan Domingo Peron and it was inaugurated in 1994 with Menem.

Before his inauguration, he already had a criminal record. On October 14, 1989, the accountant Anthony Casanova He charged that 15% tax refunds were illegally collected for the concrete used in the construction of the dam. The same thing had happened with 25% of the tires used in the works. Total fraud to the state reached $191,004,275,394.

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As he delayed the work, so he delayed the cause. The file was initially declared prescribed. The Federal Chamber upheld part of the statute of limitations and ordered the rest to be investigated. The defendants were prosecuted, but later dismissed and prosecuted again. In 2017, There is, director of Dicmar SA, Rizzo, representative of Impregilo SA, one of the subcontracting companies, and Ortega, in charge of the tenders, were sent back to the oral procedure. In 2019, the Federal Oral Court initiated the process.

The cause is so old that many documents that Justice has compiled are in the Austral -the currency which was then replaced by the peso in 1991- and several of them had to go in search of old archives of the public administration because of their seniority. When the case started, what is now the courts of Comodoro Py did not exist and it was dealt with under the old Code of Criminal Procedure.

federal prosecutor Abel Cordoba and the lawyer Jose Manuel Ubeira – representative of the plaintiff Casanova – understood that the accusations were proven and requested sentences of four to five years in prison and the complaint five to six years.

The three defendants were acquitted in November 2020. The judge Guillaume Costabel considered as the prescribed cause. Colleagues Gabriela López Iñíguez and Daniel Obligado they acquitted Ortega of guilt and indictment and Rizzo and Henin of the benefit of the doubt. The majority vote referred to the extension of the case and referred to “the erosion caused by the passage of time on the plexus of evidence”.

“The manner in which the ‘Yacyretá’ case was conducted represents perhaps the failure of all that justice should be able to offer society and has irretrievably led to a serious degradation of the evidence to which this Court has been confronted: deceased witnesses; others who remembered virtually nothing of the events, or who had to be questioned about documentation that was extremely difficult to verify because it had been accumulated in messy old boxes, full of yellowish files that were often incomplete or rotten.they pointed out.

The prosecutor’s office and the complaint appealed the decision. And on December 26, the judges of the Federal Chamber of Criminal Cassation Angela Ledesma, Guillermo Yacobucci and Carlos Mahiques confirmed the layoffs.

“As can be seen from the reading of the resources and the arguments presented by the magistrates, it is found that the accusers have not been able to refute the foundations of the impugned resolution, in order to demonstrate what the defect of this decision would consist of in, a circumstance that prevents the attempted routes from being admitted. Under these conditions, it can be concluded that the contested pronouncement has been reasonably substantiated and the appeals only show a different opinion on the question debated and resolved, “said the magistrates .

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Given this decision, there remained the instance of appeal before the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation on the part of Ubeira as plaintiff and the cassation prosecutor. Javier deLuca. But both understood that the possibility of filing an extraordinary federal appeal to seize the highest court did not apply in the case, where the deadline for the file could be extended by several years – since there is no of delays to solve – with little chance that the acquittals are revoked. Thus, they remained firm and the case closed after 33 years.

In the middle there was another case for Yacyretá who was convicted. In 1998, Menem’s government and the Italian company Ansaldo Energía Spa signed a $70 million contract to purchase five turbines for the dam. It was detected that in this operation 17 million dollars were illegally returned to the company. In 2013, the Federal Oral Court 6 sentenced six former civil servants to terms ranging from four to three years in prison, including the former Undersecretary for Industry of the Nation Miguel Angel Ravenwho was imprisoned.

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