President Gabriel Boric accepted the resignation of the now former Minister of Justice, Marcela Ríos. In his replacement, he announced prominent lawyer Luis Cordero Vega. With his arrival at La Moneda, a series of relevant antecedents have come to light.
The first of them, an old intellectual plagiarism, which dates back to 2016, where it is detailed that in August 2015 a summary was filed against him, following a series of complaints made by professors Claudio Moraga, Cristián Román and Gladys Camacho, and which concluded with a disciplinary sanction against Cordero.
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In said document, it is stated that in October 2016 the administrative process was completed, resolving to “apply the disciplinary measure of suspension of employment for two months with enjoyment of 50% of their remunerations.” For its part, the dean’s office of the University of Chile described the offenses as “violations of the duty of administrative probity.”
The plagiarism was evidenced as a result of a series of verbatim transcriptions in his books: The responsibility of the State Administration (2011) and Administrative Law Lessons (2015). Both without the use of quotes and without granting the respective credits.
Another background about Luis Cordero is that he has been an adviser to the current Minister of the Interior, Carolina Tohá, in the Accounts trials that are pending against him before the Office of the Comptroller General of the Republic, for issues related to his management as mayoress of Santiago. Cordero is the husband of the lawyer Magdalena Atria, current ambassador of Chile in Germany, very close to Carolina Tohá. She was his Legal Director in the Municipality of Santiago when Tohá served as mayor.
It should be noted that the Comptroller’s Office ruled in favor of Tohá in one of the Accounts proceedings against him, within the framework of his administration in the Municipality of Santiago, where he was mayor between 2012 and 2016. Two other processes are still ongoing.
Luis Cordero Vega has a degree in Legal Sciences from the University of the Republic, a Master’s in Public Policy from the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Chile and a PhD in Law from the University of Lleida, Spain.
He is a professor of Administrative Law at the University of Chile and a senior researcher at the Center for Regulation and Competition of the Faculty of Law of the aforementioned house of studies. According to a statement issued by the Presidency, Cordero “was working as a partner in the Ferrada Nehme law office, where he directed the Public Law and Government area.”
Cordero Vega was coordinator of the Environmental Institutional Reform, Law 20,417 that created the Ministry of the Environment and the environmental evaluation services, such as the SEA and the Superintendence of the Environment.
In 2011, he was a member of the Desormeaux Commission, a group in charge of reforming the financial supervision of the Ministry of Finance. Likewise, his participation as president of the group of experts for institutional reform in the stock market is added.
