The history of the Institute of Clean Technologies (ITL) added a new chapter, due to the fact that a criminal investigation was opened that seeks to investigate the acts of the Corporation for the Promotion of Production (Corfo) and various authorities regarding the bidding process for its creation. , which was awarded to a consortium made up of private Chilean institutions, such as the Universidad del Desarrollo and the Universidad San Sebastián, both linked to representatives of the previous government and the UDI and to the Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), a North American corporation.
The investigation, which is currently confidential, originated after the revealing report prepared by the Investigative Commission of the Chamber of Deputies and Deputies, which was supported by the Plenary with 122 votes in favor, 2 against and 21 abstentions. In the document, the procedure carried out in the Request for Proposals Stage for the ITL is questioned, the actions of the Evaluation Commission (intermediate entity between the technical unit and the instance that made the allocation decision) and its conformation of character are highlighted. political and not technical. And the former executive vice president of Corfo, Pablo Terrazas, is accused of intervening.
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Although the investigation is confidential, The counter confirmed that in charge of it are the deputy prosecutor of the High Complexity Prosecutor’s Office in the Central North Prosecutor’s Office, Jaime Retamal, and the head of High Complexity of the Central North Metropolitan Prosecutor’s Office, Ximena Chong, who have already begun to interrogate various people.
One of them was the president of the aforementioned Investigative Commission, deputy Tomás Hirsch (AH), who appeared to testify on May 12. “Regarding this case, and as is known, within the conclusions of the Investigative Committee of the Chamber, it became clear to us that there were at least irregular situations here, which required investigation by the courts, in addition to all the controls that we carry out. in the Chamber and in addition to requesting that this tender be annulled, an issue that is also being seen at this time in the Supreme Court as a result of a protection appeal filed by the Council of Rectors“, said.
“We are in the presence of a tender that was tremendously irregular. And all of this is contained in the very long report that we presented as a commission. Among other things, we request that an investigation be initiated by the Prosecutor’s Office and as the Chamber of Deputies and Deputies We sent all the records that were in our possession and the Prosecutor’s Office quickly initiated a procedure. That is why I, in my capacity as former president of this Commission, testified as a witness, disclosing all the details that we saw in the Commission, to those who received, what was it that they told us, why did we form the conviction regarding, at the very least, irregularities, but quite possibly some situations at odds with justice, since there are a series of situations that leave very high suspicions,” he added.
The counter also communicated with Corfo, from where they limited themselves to responding under the umbrella of the confidential nature of the investigation: “In compliance with the provisions of article 182 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, it is not possible for us to deliver the requested information. Corfo complied with requested by the Public Ministry, sending the background of the bankruptcy process and, to date, no Corfo official has been summoned to testify,” they indicated.
The lapidary report of the Chamber
Within the background presented by the aforementioned commission, it is stated that, despite the fact that the international expert evaluators maintained that the proposal presented by the Alta Ley Corporation, as the representative of the entities grouped in ASDIT, was superior in all weighted aspects to AUI’s proposal, “said evaluation was ignored and the criteria were modified to lower the qualifications obtained by the first and increased those obtained by the second, by the national evaluation committee.”
The document of the Investigative Commission affirms that an error (not remedied) was made when delivering untrue information about the proposal of the Alta Ley Corporation (ASDIT), regarding the financing of the project. With this, the contribution of the Chilean consortium was reduced by US$ 37 million, when in reality it amounted to US$ 84 million.
In this line, they point against the then executive vice president of Corfo, Pablo Terrazas, for not disqualifying himself despite being part of the directories of the applicant entities. In addition, according to Camara.cl, the text highlights that his actions tended to “limit the resources of the proposal and deliver false information to the ministers and undersecretaries who made up the Council of Ministers.”
The proposal that was awarded the tender, AUI, did so for 143 million dollars, the exact figure put up for tender by this consortium of foreign universities. Meanwhile, that of the consortium of national universities (ASDIT) was for the total amount to be tendered (193 million dollars), as was the availability of resources offered in the call and established in the contract with SQM as an R&D contribution. for the ITL.
The Commission concluded that there was a concerted action by the institutions and questioned the participation of Terrazas. The report indicates that “there have been, at least, breaches of the principle of probity that governs the actions of public bodies (…). This act could well be described as taking advantage of privileged information that has turned out to be key to the award of the project”.
