The 1st Shift Money Laundering prosecutor, Enrique Rodríguez, requested the reopening to analyze the additional evidence indicated by the board of directors of the public company.
The prosecutor of 1st Shift Money Laundering, Enrique Rodríguezdecided to reopen the investigation for alleged irregularities in the construction of the Antel Arena in Montevideo. Now, a judge must check that the request is within the deadline before giving rise to a second stage in the case for the stadium in the capital of Uruguay.
After the president Luis Lacalle Pou requested that all necessary judicial procedures be exhausted to continue the investigations into the construction of the stadium and that the judge Alejandro Asteggiante will enable the reexamination of the case filed by the prosecutor of Economic Crimes, Alejandro Machado; Rodríguez defined reopening the case, one of the alternatives he could choose after analyzing the file in question, as reported by El País.
The directory of Antel had requested the reexamination arguing the existence of evidence that had not been taken into account during the first investigation. Taking this into account, Rodríguez considered that there were pending proceedings, including the addition of some documents and the request for some testimonies, as indicated by the Prosecutor’s Office; therefore, protected by the Code of Criminal Procedurerequested to reopen the investigation that he himself conducted in the first place, when he was in charge of Economic Crimes.
This last point was somewhat questioned by different specialists since, being a prosecutor who had acted in the case, he should not have been able to analyze it in a second instance. However, others pointed out that, since he had not made a substantive decision in it, he was not disqualified from re-examining the file from which Machado defined that there were “sloppiness” and “wasteful management of public resources,” but No crimes.
If Judge Asteggiante grants Rodríguez’s request, he will be the one to continue the investigation.
What irregularities will be reinvestigated?
As confirmed in the complaint filed in November 2021 by the board of directors of Antel, The problem lies, mainly, in three irregularities that were allegedly committed during the construction of the stadium.
First of all, it would have violated “the specialty principle” which establishes that autonomous entities cannot carry out “businesses extraneous” to their function determined by law. That is to say, Antel should not have been able to build an entertainment complex since it has nothing to do with its public role.
On the other hand, the cost of the Antel Arena It ended up being more than double what was initially estimated by the mayor of Montevideo in license use, Cosse, as confirmed by an external audit. Furthermore, in comparing the cost of constructing the stadium with other similar spaces in the region, that of the capital would have been considerably higher.
For Machado, these issues represent “sloppiness” and “wasteful management of resources,” but not crimes that should be punished by law. However, Rodríguez considered that there is room to continue delving deeper into the investigation of these issues, especially based on the additional evidence that the complainant —Antel— maintains that it is missing.
Source: Ambito
