2024-09-11 09:23:27
In response to the Prosecutor’s inquiry, the former ministerial authority stated that during Sebastián Piñera’s second government, efforts were made to unblock the processing of 200 projects to promote investment and not just the Grupo Patio initiative.
The Eastern Metropolitan Prosecutor’s Office reported that it opened an investigation against former minister Felipe Ward, within the framework of the Grupo Patio aspect of the Audios case.
According to a Ciper report, Lawyer Luis Hermosilla – advisor to the Ministry of the Interior – made arrangements in 2020 with the Ministry of Housing, in charge of Wardto speed up the procedures that would allow Grupo Patio to build buildings in a rural area of Lampa.
The Feasibility Report for Construction (IFC) managed to unblock the transfer of land valued at more than $10 billion, a process that takes up to two years, in just two months. Faced with this, the then metropolitan regional minister Manuel José Errázuriz claimed to have received pressure from Felipe Ward to “speed up the process.”
“Nobody told me to do something that was not appropriate, but that it was Hurry up, can you please get the answer quickly?. And I had to make that descent to my team,” said Errázuriz.
In response to the investigation by the Prosecutor’s Office, The former ministerial authority stated that during Sebastián Piñera’s second government, they sought to unblock the processing of 200 projects to encourage investment and not just the initiative of the Patio Group.
“The government made the decision to unblock, promote and accelerate nearly 200 investment projects, which generated investment and employment. It is a list of concrete projects and this project was on that list,” he said. a public statement.
Felipe Ward stressed that it is “good to be precise, to respect the presumption of innocence and not to invent explanations regarding a topic where the data kills the story. Here, a series of projects that had been on hold were accelerated. The Ministry of Housing worked in a coordinated manner with the other ministries and promoted projects, but no one person benefited and no project in particular was promoted.”
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Given this new background, Minister Carlos Montes ordered a summary investigation to be carried out within the ministry to “see whether or not there are possible crimes or possible violations of the law. The Seremi, which is where all this is processed, is reviewing all the records and all the previous processes to see what the situation is regarding the events that occurred during the previous administration.”
The Secretary of State added that these There were 400 hectares where Parque Capital presented various projects, “in 162 of them, the DOM of Lampa approved a project, which ultimately did not comply with all the procedures.”
“There is always lobbying in ministries, because it is part of management, but it is done under the Lobby Law, but to what extent a lobby leads to altering a normal decision is what needs to be investigated. We have to review exactly what the actions meant from the point of view of altering the order, of giving it priority and what it implied in the decisions that were taken,” Montes said.