The Public Ministry -in a hearing that lasted more than 14 hours- formalized the 30 foreign defendants accused of issuing false medical licenses and managed to establish preventive detention for seven of them.
Before the 14th Guarantee Court of Santiago, the Eastern Metropolitan Prosecutor’s Office accused that the leaders of the organization constituted medical societies and hired foreign professionals, who issued the documents without real attention or diagnosis.
According to the prosecuting entity, in the last three years, the tax damage caused by the action exceeded $700 million, which translates into 25% of Fonasa’s budget to pay for licenses. One of the defendants even created 10 medical centers to sell the fraudulent documents.
The High Complexity Prosecutor for Eastern Organized Crime, Constanza Encina, explained that “the defendants, previously arranged, acted as leaders of criminal organizations destined to commit repeated crimes of issuing and fraudulently selling ideologically false medical licenses, a criminal business that they carried out through of different medical societies through which they recruited and hired foreign doctors for the massive issuance and subsequent illegal sale of the aforementioned medical licenses, thus causing economic damage to the Health Fund (Fonasa), which paid for the days of absence from work of the workers in an unjustified manner”.
It should be noted that one of the investigated doctors issued 16,000 medical licenses, which means that he alone defrauded Fonasa for $5 billion. From the defense of the accused it was maintained that the arguments of the Prosecutor’s Office pointed to “an exordium based on criteria that were far from criminal law” with a “non-existence of accredited crimes.”
