Diario Libertad, June 3, 2022
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
Contrary to what the candidate Rodolfo Hernández is saying, the journalist Daniel Coronell revealed in a column in WRadio that there is evidence against him, and that the prosecutors in the Attorney General’s Office presented it in drafting a criminal complaint alleging that he had had an illegal interest in a public contract.
In an interview with that radio station, Presidential candidate Rodolfo Hernández talked about the legal procedure in the Vitalogic case that the prosecutors are filing against him. He said, “It’s not a prosecution for corruption. The Attorney General’s office doesn’t have any evidence against me.”
I am embarrassed to have to contradict the engineer, but those two statements are false.
With regard to that, the columnist Daniel Coronell made some assertions.
“In the first place, the criminal complaint against Hernández is definitely for corruption. The crime charged is called illegal interest in public contracts, and is classified among crimes against public administration which, not only in the penal area, but also in the area of discipline, that is considered an act of corruption,” states Coronell.
According to the journalist, in the same case, the prosecutors are charging five other people for the alleged commission of the crimes of falsifying a private document, a contract that does not comply with legal requirements, and recently, illegal interests in public contracting.
Also being charged is José Manuel Barrera, manager of the urban sanitation utility business (EMAB) in Bucaramanga during Rodolfo Hernández’s term as Mayor.
Barrera reluctantly accepted the charges. That’s to say, he admitted having committed two of the three crimes charged and he is looking for a plea deal on the third, with the understanding that he will tell everything he knows. “Let’s be frank: what the plea deal assumes is that the manager of the sanitation utility business will testify against Hernández, and he has already done that,” he adds.
In the second place, the candidate Rodolfo Hernández said breezily on WRadio that the Attorney General’s Office has no evidence against him. That it’s the work of some “vergajos” (crude slur) that want to do him harm.
Coronell adds, “Hernández is hammering again and again that the money in question is only 344 million pesos that the sanitation business was going to pay a consultant known as Jorge Alarcón, and he insists that he donated his salary of 1,200 million pesos during the four years he served as Mayor, so what’s the sense of talking about 344 million when he donated 1,200 million?”
At the same time, he added:
“In the first place the one thing has nothing to do with the other. Donating his salary doesn’t give him the right to evade questions about his management of public resources, whatever their quantity.
“In the second place, behind the contracting of the consultant, the 344 million pesos of honorarium was not the point. The point was the consultant contract that would be skimmed. What was the value of that contract? Get this: 570,000 million pesos. A contract to manage the trash in Bucaramanga for 30 years.
So the problem was not the 300 little old millions, but rather the 570,000 million.”