ABC tender commission member says Chinese company favored

An official from the qualification commission for the tender for the Sucre-Yamparáez highway admitted that the award process was manipulated to favor the Chinese company Chec. According to the Police investigation, for this procedure, the foreign construction company paid a bribe of Bs 18.6 million involving the president of ABC, Henry Nina.

The statement was made on Monday at the Sucre Prosecutor’s Office by Juan Carlos Hidalgo Chura, appointed by memorandum as part of the qualification commission of the contracting process for the construction of the highway. In that testimony he denied that he had met with Chec’s representative, Jin Zhengyuan. Nevertheless, He confessed that he did manipulate the tender documents and changed papers “under pressure” for the Chinese company to be awarded the work.

Hidalgo assured that Nina gave him and three other officials a memorandumon December 23, to form the construction qualification commission.

complemented that On December 28, 2021, they began the review of the qualification proposals, even receiving a call from William Ramiro Mamani Loza, national administrative manager of ABC, which requested a summary of the companies (cell phone number, legal representative and company number). “That information was sent the next day,” according to the version.

Hidalgo Chura said that On January 3, Mamani, in La Paz, called him at his office to ask how the hiring process was going. and he gave her the names of the three companies that were still in competition. The next day, the 4th, they traveled to Sucre to continue with the evaluation.

He recounted that that morning he received another call from William Mamani, who asked him what he had to say about the Chec company, “Whether or not I could win the award. I made him aware of the observations that this company had in its technical proposal”.

He confessed that on January 6, 2022, when Chec had already been awarded the job, William Mamani called him from an unknown cell phone to meet at the Bolivia residential complex in Sucre. “He gives me a password to enter the room. The password was Chicken. I entered with a chubby man in a black jacket, about 1.70 meters tall, then two people entered, one of them was white, with glasses and the other had a Camba accent. I met for three minutes, I told him that in the technical proposal there were errors on two pages, nothing else and I left the room”.

Before doing so, he recounts, “I warned that if they do not change those sheets of the technical proposal they would not win, so they left the two sheets in a sealed envelope. In the afternoon, I picked it up and took it to the qualification commission and passed it on to the RPC (the departmental head of ABC), this with the consent of the entire commission”.

Then he pointed out that all the “negotiation to get together with that person in the residential Bolivia was in charge of William Mamani. I suffered harassment those days.”

He noted that he never met the legal representative of the Chec company, Jin Zhengyuan. “I never met him, I’ve never seen him,” she said. However, a police report “individualizes” in photographs and indicates that this meeting did take place.

The report reads that “In the following photograph, Chinese citizen Jin Zhengyuan can be seen together with other people, including Juan Carlos Hidalgo Chura.in what would be an environment of the Bolivia residential, where they presumably met to modify and correct documents related to the Sucre-Yamparáez double-track project, ”says the document.

He adds that “on the bed you can see several sheets of paper that would be the indicated documents. The Chinese national is lying on the bed” and describes how Chec’s manager was dressed.

Show the image from another angle, and point out that “You can see Mr. Juan Carlos Hidalgo, along with Zhengyuan and two other subjects, in what would be the Bolivia residential on January 6, 2022; It can be seen that Mr. Hidalgo is manipulating documents, which would be related to the project that, according to the informative interview, would have come from Hidalgo Chura’s backpack. He insists, they would be “original documents taken from ABC” and “what he would be doing on that occasion would be the modification and correction of documents.”