The Ortega Murillo regime inaugurated on November 25, 51 altars in honor of the Virgin Mary, located on Avenida Bolívar, in Managua. However, he did not mention anything about the cost that these structures had for State institutions, in a context in which the country suffers the ravages of the health crisis generated by covid-19, added to the socio-political crisis it has faced since 2018 , when state and government repression against social protests was unleashed.
The inauguration event of the altars was chaired by Camila Ortega Murillo and Laureano Ortega Murillo, children of the presidential couple, together with the mayor of Managua Reyna Rueda, the co-director of Intur Anasha Campbell, the vice mayor Enrique Armas, the director of the Rubén theater Darío Ramón Rodríguez, reported the propaganda portal El 19 Digital.
CONFIDENTIAL found that, until this November 28, most of the 51 institutions, which allocated funds for the installation of the altars, have not disclosed their bidding processes for the purchase or elaboration of the altars, which have already been installed and inaugurated in the Avenida Bolívar, on the official Nicaragua Compra website.
The National Lottery -according to the review carried out by this medium- is the only one that published, on November 12, a tender for “minor contracting” related to the placement of its altar on Avenida Bolívar.
The purchase process of the National Lottery was titled “Structure rental services to cover platforms on Bolívar Avenue” and was awarded to Juan Guillermo Vélez Loáisiga for an amount of 198,000 cordobas.
Although in the title of the tender the National Lottery does not indicate that the structure is for the altar that it located on Bolívar Avenue, in the service contract it was specified that said platform would be within a period of November 25, 2021 to January 7 2022, precisely the period in which the regime orders that the altars be maintained on Avenida Bolívar.
The lack of transparency in the use of public resources by the State has already been publicly denounced by international reports. Last June, the United States Department of State, through its 2021 Fiscal Transparency report, determined that in 2020 the Nicaraguan government – like 66 other governments in the world – “did not meet the minimum requirements of fiscal transparency.”
The document highlighted that Nicaragua is among the countries that fail to comply with the minimum requirements of fiscal transparency because the “budget documents available to the public did not provide a substantially complete picture of the expenditures and income flows foreseen by the Government.”
?#CitizenReport | Many people and few masks. This is how the area of the altars is located, financed and installed with funds from the State institutions, on Avenida Bolívar, in Managua. pic.twitter.com/O2BpYBEvC9
– Confidencial Nicaragua (@confidencial_ni) November 29, 2021
Institutions spend millions of dollars on altars
An Article 66 investigation, released in January 2019, revealed the waste of millions of córdobas that was reported by 13 of the 53 State institutions that participated in 2018 in the placement of altars on Avenida Bolívar.
The work refers that as a whole, according to the spending budget, the 13 state entities added 12,266,450 córdobas as a fund for the “altars” item.
The institutions that declared the expense for the installation of the altars, according to said investigation, were: Municipal Administrative Career (a training entity for municipal officials), General Directorate of Income (DGI), Nicaraguan Electricity Company (ENEL), National Port Company (EPN), Emergency Social Investment Fund (FISE), National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA), Nicaraguan Institute of Civil Aeronautics, Nicaraguan Institute of Fisheries and Aquaculture (Inpesca), Nicaraguan Institute of Tourism (Intur) , National Lottery, Ministry of the Interior (Migob), Ministry of Community, Cooperative and Associative Family Economy (Mefcca).
