In the document that this medium could access, loans contracted with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) were evaluated. At that time, of a total of US$27.141 million in active loans, the multilaterals represented more than US$18.600 million. Therefore, the sample is materially representative. In addition to the high consulting expenses, the Audit added that the information provided by the Ministry of Finance “lacks a detail of the expenses applied to administration costs of the projects evaluated”, which “makes it difficult to carry out a correct analysis of the level of economic and financial execution.
Among the hundreds of projects, the most striking case is that of the “Integral Improvement for Border Settlements” Program. According to the planned schedule, the execution should end in 2020. The fundamental objective: to build houses. However, 100% of the disbursements went to the Management and Administration item, while the categories Comprehensive Improvement of the Habitat, Ownership Regularization and Strengthening of Management Capacity did not receive any type of investment. In other words, there was not a single disbursement applied to the final objective of the loan.
The report on the process of prioritization and approval of projects financed with international credits detected weaknesses in the monitoring of results. It also maintains that “there are international loans and projects started with incomplete data on the file.” On this point, he points out that due to the precarious registration “the start of credit management operations was affected.”
On the other hand, it mentions a “partial compliance with the requirements for the presentation of investment projects with high budget significance” and adds that “this affected the socioeconomic evaluation of public investment projects with international financing.”
Miguel Ángel Pichetto, explosive
The debate on the report of the “Integral Improvement Program for Border Settlements”, where all the investment went to consulting expenses, raised strong questions. Even from a member of Mauricio Macri’s political space. According to the stenographic version of that session, the auditor Miguel Ángel Pichetto, a former vice-presidential candidate, said: “When we see that the only thing that was spent is the money for the consultants, we have to put all these guys in jail.”
During his speech, the former national senator also remarked that “proceedings should be opened to find out what happened to the money, because what can be seen is that absolutely nothing was carried out regarding the issue of border settlements, there was no peso” . And he continued: “In three years, 325,657 dollars were spent on consultancies and salary payments, while the progress of the work supposedly object of the credit does not reach 1 percent.”
For Pichetto, “this is all the crime of these characters, who took almost 400,000 dollars and were not interested in moving a brick.” Along the same lines, he considered that “it is an issue of extraordinary seriousness and it clearly shows that they are not interested in the work, the only thing that interests them is making money”. As sources from the control body anticipated to Ámbito, in the next reports the focus will be on finding out which consultants benefited from the credits that were taken in foreign currency between 2016 and 2019.
Source: Ambito
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