In the opinion of the prosecutor Luis Pacheco in the regasification project Gas Sayago “were found unforeseen, strategic mistakes, negligence and administrative irregularitiessome typical of a highly complex project”.
Despite the financial losses that this generated, “the commission of arbitrary acts is not noticed“as required by the Penal Code that have been “intentionally aimed at harming the State”as stated in the tax opinion to which he agreed The Observer.
Due to the impossibility of verifying that it was with the intention of causing harm to the State, the prosecutor decided to ask the Organized Crime judge, María Helena Mainard, to archive the case, a request reported by El País.
“It has not been proven that the public officials investigated had acted with abuse of officeoutside its limits, nor with the deliberate intention of causing harm to the State or to individuals, without prejudice to eventual responsibilities of an administrative nature,” Pacheco explained. He clarified that Criminal Justice is not the area in which it is appropriate to analyze ” the merit, the opportunity, the convenience and the success or failure” of the decisions made, even if they have been adopted “ignoring the opinion of technicians or consultants”.
He recalled that the complaints made spoke of “perverse legal engineering”, “foresight, negligence and fault”, irregularities, payment of excessive expenses in consultancies and fees and more. But all this, as inconvenient as it might be, was within the powers of the public officials involved.
On the other hand, it collected the opinion of the Board of Transparency and Public Ethics, which concludes that “a deviation from the general guidelines of good administration and public ethics” was verified. But as a result of the facts analyzed, the prosecutor insists, there are no conducts that could be classified as criminal figures.
In the case, it had been denounced that Brazilian public officials had interfered to favor the subcontracting of the OAS company, but that, in Pacheco’s opinion couldn’t test.
A Brazilian investigator declared that the then Minister of Industry of his country, Fernando Pimentel, had explained to him that “he had mediated in the interest of OAS for the construction of a gas pipeline in Uruguay… that he had contacts with the then head of the Civil House of President Mujica… who made possible the contracting of OAS for the construction of the gas pipeline”.
But the prosecutor held that no other elements emerge to support that information. There is no “identity of the person eventually contacted, nor the tenor of the alleged influence, nor if there were indeed pressures or directives in the sense of favoring the subcontracting of said company.”
In this case, the former president of Ancap, Raúl Sendic, the former manager of Gas Sayago, Marta Jara, the former director of UTE Gonzalo Casaravilla, among other officials, were investigated.
