Arturo Sánchez Jimenez
La Jornada newspaper
Thursday, January 13, 2022, p. 10
By order of the National Institute of Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data (INAI), the Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF) of the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit (SHCP) must make public the criminal complaints it has filed against President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the previous five holders of the federal Executive.
A private individual requested this information from the UIF (headed by Pablo Gómez Álvarez), which denied it on the grounds that it is classified information because it includes confidential data, and said it was prevented from issuing any indication about the existence of investigations against former presidents Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Ernesto Zedillo, Vicente Fox, Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto or against López Obrador.
Given the refusal to open the information, the applicant requested the intervention of the INAI.
The matter was analyzed by Commissioner Francisco Javier Acuña Llamas, who yesterday presented the case to the full institute.
The commissioner acknowledged that when a person is investigated by the authorities, the information from those investigations is confidential, but in this case, since they are officials who have held the highest position in the country’s public service, exceptions can be made, as they must put accountability before other considerations.
The plenary session of the INAI determined that because they are public servants of the highest level, the reservation invoked by the SHCP to not deliver the information is not appropriate. For this reason, the FIU must provide the number of complaints it has filed between 2005 and 2021 against the former presidents and the President before the Attorney General’s Office or its predecessor, the Attorney General’s Office.
The president commissioner of INAI, Blanca Lilia Ibarra Cadena, considered that this resolution is inserted in a set of determinations that the plenary session of this institute has been issuing over the years, in which it has fought for the opening of information related to open investigations with respect to high-level public servants and also representatives of popular election, in which confidentiality has been overcome through the application of a proportionality test
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