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LIMA – The Peruvian Congress approved this Monday the start of a new impeachment process against President Martín Vizcarra after new allegations of corruption. A month and a half ago, Vizcarra survived a similar attempt, but at the time there were not enough votes to remove him from power.
On this occasion, the start of the process was approved with 60 votes in favor, 40 against and 18 abstentions. Vizcarra, who has no party, came to power in March 2018 after the resignation of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, of whom he was vice president and who was also the subject of a dismissal process on charges of participation in cases of bribery of the Brazilian construction company. Odebrecht.
The request to open the prosecution process was presented after reports were published indicating that Vizcarra had received around R $ 3.6 million in bribes from two companies, which would have benefited from public works tenders. The case would have occurred in 2014, when Vizcarra was governor of the Moquegua region, in the south of the country. Denies the charges.
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The lawsuit was filed on October 20 by the Union for Peru party (UPP). Several parliamentarians said the charges are serious and that they want to hear the defense of the president, whose term ends in July 2021, the country’s presidential and legislative elections will be on April 11.
“It is the least we have to do,” said Deputy Diethell Colombo.
To approve the removal of Vizcarra, at least 87 votes from the 130 members of the Chamber will be required. If this happens, the president of the Chamber, Manuel Merino, of the Popular Action Party, takes office.
Before the vote in Congress, Vizcarra had shown confidence:
– There is no evidence of the charges. I am sure that Congress will not fall into the game of a political group that seeks chaos – said the president, who will now have to report to Congress on November 9 to present his defense.
In mid-October, a collaborator in the Clube da Construção tax investigations, a process involving some 30 companies that conspired between 2002 and 2016 to distribute tenders for public works, presented alleged evidence of a $ 300,000 bribe that would have been He paid Vizcarra in 2014, when he was governor of Moquegua, according to the Peruvian press.
The bribery, according to the testimony of those investigated, occurred in exchange for privileged information that Vizcarra would have passed so that the construction company Obrainsa and its Italian partner Astaldi could win the dispute over the Lomas de Ilo irrigation work, a tender administered by the Office of United Nations services. of Projects (Unops).
It is a common practice in the Peruvian public administration to delegate the execution and management of works tenders to international entities. The strategy restricts access to information on these processes, since they are not covered by the transparency requirements of the State Procurement Law.
Vizcarra was regional governor of Moquegua between 2011 and 2014. The Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office indicated, in 2017, that 67 governors and former governors had been being investigated for events since 2013, including the current president.
According to employee information, in 2013 Obrainsa’s manager, Elard Tejada, presented Unops with a proposal for irrigation works, but at the beginning of October the entity asked him to change the budget. The businessman would then have called Vizcarra, then governor of Moquegua, who confirmed that he could pass on information that had not been disclosed: the budget that the regional government had for that tender.
In return, he asked for a “commission” of 2% of the work. The current president also said that Unops would inform him of the results of the proposal “before making the concession, so that he can express his no objection,” according to newspaper El Comercio.
