Gustavo Castillo Garcia
The newspaper La Jornada
Wednesday, July 31, 2024, p. 15
The Specialized Prosecutor’s Office for Combating Corruption (FEMCC) succeeded in having a federal judge based in Torreón, Coahuila, order the first indictment of Francisco Ayala Borunda, former president of the Local Board of Conciliation and Arbitration number 42, based in that city, for having participated in a corruption network related to the illicit granting of irregular amounts in around 3 thousand pensions granted by the Institute of Security and Social Services to State Workers (ISSSTE).
At the initial hearing, the control judge refused to endorse the justified preventive detention requested by the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office for the former president of the local council and two attorneys.
Last January, The Day The agency announced that between 2011 and 2019, the ISSSTE was the target of pension fraud worth more than 12,733 million pesos and that the FEMCC initiated 131 investigation files involving cases in Nuevo León, Coahuila, Durango, Morelos, Mexico City and other entities.
According to information obtained by this newspaper, the Local Board of Conciliation and Arbitration number 42 was detected by the ministerial authorities, the ISSSTE and the Superior Audit Office of the Federation, as one of the instances through which the largest number of illegal grants of pension resources were made, in collusion with law firms and officials of the institute.
The corruption network operated as follows: the lawyers co-opted retirees and convinced them that they could obtain higher pension income by demanding amounts that did not correspond to them; in exchange they received 50 percent of what was assigned to them as accumulated compensation. Officials of the Conciliation and Arbitration Board accepted the demands, even though the resolution of these appeals was the responsibility of the Federal Administrative Court.
Later, the ISSSTE officials involved abstained from promoting appeals to the awards and let the resolutions take shape, and thus the embezzlements were carried out. These connections were part of the arguments presented before Coahuila judges who are already familiar with the discharge of several investigation files.
In this case, within the criminal case 299/2023, on Wednesday, July 23, shortly after 12:30 p.m., the initial hearing began and after more than five hours of debate before the judge, the defense of the accused requested the duplication of the constitutional term for their legal situation to be resolved; the continuation took place last Sunday, from 4 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.
The control judge issued an order to link to proceedings against Francisco Ayala Borunda, former president of the Local Board of Conciliation and Arbitration number 42, as well as the actuaries Raquel Andrea Hinojos Martínez and Christian Jesús Montelongo Reza.
All three were charged with their alleged responsibility for the crime contemplated in article 225 of the Federal Penal Code, section VII.
Although representatives of the Attorney General’s Office argued that the three should remain in justified preventive detention, because the awards they issued caused damages estimated at around 3 billion pesos to the finances of the ISSSTE, the judge of the case imposed the precautionary measure of monthly periodic presentation to the three and the former president of the Local Conciliation and Arbitration Board number 42, Borunda Ayala, the prohibition to leave the country, for which reason he had to surrender his passport.
