Even though the report issued by the legislative commission that investigated the cementazo scandal established several recommendations to investigate apparent breaches of the duty of probity by former President Luis Guillermo Solís, in the end, the Public Ethics Office decided to study only two of the recommendations, ignoring others.
Based on this, the Ethics Office decided to issue a report exempting Solís from any possible breach of the duty of probity, a document that was sent to the Legislative Assembly at a time considered inappropriate, given that they did so in the final week of the previous Congress and a day when legislators do not even go to their offices.
Carlos Ricardo Benavides, head of the National Liberation faction, faced the interim ethics attorney, Tatiana Gutiérrez , on Monday, for ruling out several of the recommendations made. They were limited to analyzing the issue of having Chinese cement in the country and the technical regulations that allowed bringing the product here.
The report issued by the cementazo commission concluded, among other things, that the Presidential House and the Governing Council instructed the board of directors of the Bank of Costa Rica to appoint Mario Barrenechea as the bank’s general manager, for which the then president failed to comply with the duty of probity for not acting under conditions of equality for all Costa Ricans with the appointment, and failed to ensure that the administration of resources was consistent with the principles of efficiency.
The report also established that Casa Presidencial never found reasons to hold accountable and sanction BCR directors despite the existing evidence, among which there were two resolutions by the same Ethics Office against director Paola Mora and manager Barrenechea, recommending sanctions.
The second of these reports was prepared by Tatiana Gutiérrez. The official was questioned as to why there were such previous reports from the Attorney General’s Office because they subsequently decided to go against the initial criteria and not to deepen the investigation, which Gutiérrez said was not within the competencies of the entity.
The official defended the decision of the entity because they made an assessment on the evidence sent by the Legislative Assembly. However, this was also questioned by the legislators that make up the commission, including Harllan Hoepelman, since its resolution was issued in around two months, a short period taking into account that the entire record consists of more than 32 thousand folios. For this they had to have analyzed more than 500 pages per day, said the legislator.
Gutiérrez confessed that the analysis of the Attorney General was superficial and that thanks to the index of the report, they only studied the references to the President. This leaves out the whole context.
This Monday it was also found that the ethics attorney, Ronald Víquez, decided to participate in the investigation against Solís, which was unusual because he is never interested in being part of the investigations carried out by the prosecutors.