Government reviews contracts for Sarmiento’s funeral to try to finish work

The government of Alberto Fernández seeks to give continuity to a work investigated for corruption, submitted several times under the Kirchner administration, which ended up being linked to the Cuadernos de las Bribes affair. This is the burial of the Sarmiento train for which Odebrecht was in charge until, driven by the legal situation, he had to leave the consortium. The Department of Transportation is currently auditing the multi-million dollar contract. They believe that terminating the contract would be very costly. This is why they are seeking to resume with the companies that remained within the SEI to try to conclude the work.

The case of the funeral is unprecedented. It was launched for the first time in 2006 when Néstor Kirchner was president and the commissioning of the works has been announced ten times. At 15, it’s not over yet.

The work was left in the hands of Brazilian giant Odebrecht, who today has a bankruptcy petition in his country and faces various lawsuits in different countries, including Argentina. As part of Operation Lava Jato, the owners of the construction company They admitted paying $ 36 million to Argentine officials until 2015 to manipulate various public works contracts. This is only part of the more than 700 million dollars that they paid in eleven other countries to obtain works.

In Comodoro Py, there are three cases of suspicious tenders attributed to the Brazilian construction company. The most important is precisely the one that investigates the corruption in the basement of the Sarmiento train, a work valued at 3000 million dollars, and attributed to the consortium formed by Odebrecht, IECSA (then of Ángelo Calcaterra, cousin of Mauricio Macri) , Ghella and ComSa SA. Due to the corruption scandal, in June 2019, the Brazilian company quit work as well as IECSA.

The contract was not terminated despite the fact that the work was suspended for two years. Official sources told Clarín that an investment of $ 1,500 million remains to complete the work, the progress of which so far includes from Haedo station to Liniers station. There are just over six kilometers to build. The budget is very expensive.

“Originally, the funding came from the Italian-born company, but Cambiemos management changed it to their own national funding. Canceling the contract costs almost the same as the tunnel works and the amount invested so far would be lost, ”said a source from Casa Rosada.

Thus, in order to resume work, an audit has been ordered from the University of San Martín, which will be delivered in the coming weeks. All of the companies that made up the temporary business unit that were assigned the job under the Kirchner government are currently under investigation, although not all are currently part of UTE.

To move the case forward, a collaboration agreement was signed with the Brazilian prosecutor’s office, which was tasked with sending all kinds of information related to the burial. As Clarín said, the documentation arrived a month ago in two batches. Through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the first shipment contained a CD with several files containing information relating to the case being processed in our country.

But a second shipment from Brazil also entered, which, according to judicial sources, contains a video which “is said to be the confession of Luiz Antonio Mameri”. It is about one of the former executives of Odebrecht who accepted the accusation pronounced in Brazil and confessed in front of the judge Sergio Moro. The former number two of the construction company for Latin America had assured on another occasion that Javier Sánchez Caballero (member of IECSA) had warned the leaders of Odebrecht that they had to make “undue payments” as they started charging for their jobs. Also according to its history, this was what had been agreed with those responsible for the planning.

The video has also been submitted for translation. Sources in the case have indicated that the large amount of financial information that has been added to the case will be analyzed by prosecutor Picardi.

In April 2019, Martínez de Giorgi sued former members of the Federal Planning Ministry for “incompatible negotiations with the civil service, failure to respect the duties of public officials and gifts”, for allegedly favoring the winning companies in the appeal for ‘offers. Also for gifts, Héctor Javier Sánchez Caballero, from Ecsa, and Héctor Castro Sirerol, from Comsa, were also prosecuted for seizures of five million pesos.

But the Federal Chamber of Buenos Aires overturned the resolution and ordered Martínez de Giorgi to re-examine the procedural situation of all the defendants, which is why Brazil was invited to collaborate. For his part, the prosecutor Franco Picardi determined the existence of “simulated contracts”, that the UTE composed of Odebrecht, Iecsa, Ghella and Comsa would have allowed him to transfer nearly $ 5 million to the Private Bank of Andorra. According to the investigation, this money was subsequently used to “pay bribes”.