On Tuesday, June 28, the former Minister of Transportation and Public Works, Luis Alberto Heber; and the pro-secretary of the Presidency, Rodrigo Ferrés, testified before the Economic Crimes Prosecutor’s Office about the agreement of the Executive Power with the company Katoen Natie by which the concession of the Cuenca del Plata Terminal was extended to the shipping company for 50 years. While this Wednesday the Undersecretary of Transportation, Juan José Olaizola, and the President of the National Ports Administration (ANP), Juan Curbelo, declared.
Heber said, according to MVD Noticias, that the extension of the concession to the Belgian company was “because of the investment” and not with the intention of avoiding the trial that the shipping company would have announced at the time. “One thing is the lawsuit, how we eliminated it, and another thing was the investment, because if they are going to give me 455 million dollars, which is the largest investment in the history of Uruguay in the port, naturally we have to give something. The fifty years are not given by judgment, they are given by investment”.
For his part, Ferrés defined the management of the Broad Front administrations as “manifest illegality”. He said that when the current multicolored government took over the administration, they found an “illegal and irregular situation in the management of the public areas of the Port of Montevideo, by previous administrations. Which by all accounts has been an embarrassment.”
they lie
The deputy of the Broad Front Gustavo Olmos said that they summoned the government authorities to testify so that they “explain the reasons why the concession of the Port was given to a company for 60 years, without an administrative file, an economic estimate, or a law by 2/3 as required by the Constitution”.
While Senator Charles Carrera questioned what Ferrés said, and said that the government authorities “are lying as they have done throughout this process and changed the role of accused to accuser.”
For his part, Senator Mario Bergara, denounced that there was a strong contradiction of the president of the ANP in the Prosecutor’s Office. “Juan Curbelo said that the advice prior to the extension of the contract should not go through the ANP Board of Directors. However, he maintained the opposite in a document sent to the MTOP”.
“This is one of the reasons why we denounce the current leaders for abuse of functions and ideological falsification, in the process in which the government handed over a monopoly in the port to a private company for 60 years. A scandal”, declared Bergara.
He added: “There is no smokescreen that can cover the scandal of the illegal delivery of the Port of Montevideo.”
