The Minister of Labor, Pablo Mieres, questioned this Friday the interpellation of the Minister of Industry, Omar Paganini, for the Antel Arena complex and assured that he did not “think it necessary.”
“I say it frankly: I did not think it necessary,” said Sarandí interviewed by radio. Although the minister assured that the call to the room to give explanations is “legally correct,” he added that “the custom” is that when a minister is called it is “to question him, which was not the objective of this call.”
“The Antel Arena thing deserved to be put on top of the table in Parliament. But it was weird”, said Mieres, who in 2018 had questioned the then Minister of Industry, Carolina cosse, as the main person in charge of the work. He also questioned whether all Antel board decisions that they had in relation to Antel Arena were declared as reserved for 10 years and concluded: “Why hide if you are doing things right?”
Mieres said that, since then, the “novelty” has been the audit hired by the current authorities, which he said “revealed” many of the issues that were questioned at the time.
The minister also questioned whate “It was said that all the telecommunications companies in the world have arenas”, which, he said, “is true”, but the difference is that “no telecommunications company built one”. What is commonly done is “naming right”, a marketing operation where the company pays for the name right for a certain period of time.
He added that “those who carry out the entertainment venues are the States, not the telecommunications companies” and that the “return on investment is clearly deficient in relation to the plans they had previously drawn up.”
Social Security
In the interview, he also assured that the position of the Broad Front regarding the reform of the pension system planned for next year “sounds opportunistic” to him, and that “it is powerfully striking” that the left-wing opposition coalition has not presented “a single proposal alternative”.
“A party that has been in office for 15 years does not have an alternative social security proposal? It sounds opportunistic,” said Mieres.
The hierarch recalled that the main leaders of the Broad Front governments had said that it was “essential” to carry out a reform of social security. The Broad Front has already reported that it does not share the recommendations made by the Committee of Social Security Experts.
Mieres also supported the bill presented by the Independent Party deputy Iván Posada, to eliminate the mandatory nature of voting in the BPS, Udelar and ANEP elections.
“I agree on the obligatory nature of voting when the government is elected. There is a right and a civic duty to contribute to the formation of the citizen’s will. But it is different when you belong to a corporation and you vote as part of a corporation,” he argued Mieres.
