In December of last year, seven Maipú councilors filed a request against the former mayor of the commune, Cathy Barriga, so that she is disqualified from holding public office for notable neglect of duties and serious breaches of probity during her administration. Today, the First Electoral Court of the Metropolitan Region declared the legal action admissible.
As stated Third, Within the points of the complaint filed by the communal authorities, a trip by Barriga along with other municipal officials to the city of Mendoza, Argentina, where they attended to see the musical show “La Cinderella” stands out, which “It meant a disbursement close to two billion pesos.”
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The brief indicates that “in order to proceed to authorize the expenses incurred in the trip to Argentina, the Municipality of Maipú used an internal regulation called ‘Procedure for the authorization and payment of per diems for service commissions and tasks of officials of the Municipality of Maipú.’ From the analysis carried out by the Comptroller’s Office it was possible to infer that said regulation did not have normative validity”.
“At the time of making the expenses to be able to take an international trip for officials of the municipality, both plant and schedule, the municipality – the request details – did not have any rule that would allow disbursing that expense or that would regulate it, and What is worse, a norm that had no validity was used as an enabling antecedent”, complements the text presented by the councilors.
Added to this complaint is a report issued by the Comptroller’s Office, which specified that the trip “has its origin in two invitations made by the Council of the Municipality of Maipú in Argentina to its namesake in Chile” and that it has not been able to prove it.
Other accusations
The request also denounces the irregularities that Cathy Barriga’s management had with the public health company of Maipú (Smapa). “The controlling entity detected that Smapa had delays ranging from 30 days to 295 days in the delivery of information to the Superintendency when it carried out the audits,” the document indicates.
In turn, the Comptroller General of the Republic “qualified as ‘complex’ the repetitive, serious and contrary attitude to administrative probity carried out by the former mayor”, for occupying “municipal resources to unduly highlight or promote her personal image”.
reactions
The leader of this legal action, the councilwoman, Ka Quiroz (Common), indicated in the same medium that “we have presented enough evidence that allows us to affirm that there were serious irregularities on the part of former mayor Cathy Barriga.”
“Given this, the objective that the seven denouncing councilors have is that there is no impunity for the damage that was done to the commune, its neighbors and neighbors, with the waste of resources from the previous administration,” he said, adding that they hope that the complaint “be a precedent so that an authority that feels the power to destroy a municipality at the expense of all the neighbors never arrives again.”
For her part, one of the lawyers who represents the communal authorities, Claudia Sarmiento, stated that “the main objective of this requirement is to establish the responsibility of the former mayor for the lack of administrative probity and breach of duties inherent to her position that were committed during the administration and that, moreover, have had serious consequences for the inhabitants of the Maipú commune”.
Finally, he pointed out that “if the Electoral Justice accepts our demand or, eventually, the one that was presented by the councilors of the previous administration, the only sanction that the Electoral Justice could establish is the inability to hold any public office for a term of five years. “.
