Another Fernandez collaborator charged with embezzlement

Santo Domingo. – The lawyers grouped in the CONA on Tuesday filed suit against former Public Works minister Victor Diaz Rua, and petroleum mogul Mustafa Abu Naba’a, on charges of conspiracy to embezzle billions of dollars from taxpayers.

The legal action is the second suit filed against former president Leonel Fernandez’s close collaborators, and include current senator Felix Bautista, charged with embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars while head of the State Works Engineers Supervisory Office (OISOE).

CONA president Junior Ramirez, who filed papers in the National District Office of the Prosecutor, said the two broke Purchasing and Contracting Law 14-86.

He said in documents dated June 25, 2012 Diaz Rua admitted that Abu’s Sargeant Petroleum Company was owed more than US$15 million and promised to pay 12 days later, or two days before the transfer of power. “The minister said then that the company was owed ??US$12.3 million, which suggests that the same debt was paid twice.”

Ramirez called alarming that Public Works paid US$139 million on the contract from 2003 to 2012, but ??paid US$55 million in just six months.

The attorney said he expects the prosecution to do its job and in his view has been biased, forcing civil society to conduct their own investigation and filed the charges, “because it’s not doing its job.”