Ex-official cries reprisal on trial for ’embezzling’ RD$1.0B

Santo Domingo.- Former Dams and Canals agency (INDRHI) director Héctor Rodríguez Pimentel affirmed Sunday that “political sectors” have put together a criminal file which “doesn’t withstand legal analysis,” for “retaliation” from a past tender between the Brazilian construction companies Odebrecht and Andrade Gutierrez.

Rodríguez said that in the preliminary trial, his lawyers concluded that it is a bad case file,” in reference to the charge of embezzling nearly RD$1.0 billion from the INDRHI.

“We can make a sancocho (stew) with that with a political objective, but that was returned to the public arena for political interest: excel with a file to want to prove that they are more pope-like than the Pope in the fight against corruption,” the former official said.

“It’s a bad file, the goal was to get me out of INDRHI so that engineer Frank Rodriguez would return. I have said things as they are, we have our lawyers, I know that I have not committed any crime, I’ll go ahead with the trial,” Rodriguez said.