The former comptroller of the General Administration of Ports during the government of Mauricio Macri, Gonzalo Mórtola, was unable to avoid the prosecution that was handed down to him in September of last year for violation of the duties of a public official, as a result of the direct contracting of a consultant by nearly a million dollars, despite taking his appeal to Chamber I of the Court of Appeals, which usually issues favorable rulings for former Macrista officials and the former president himself.
The chambermaids Leopoldo Bruglia and Mariano Llorens confirmed the prosecution due to the “irregularities evidenced in the administrative actions”, which led to the hiring of the company INDRA SA and “the context in which they were adopted”. In this way, they confirmed the ruling of Judge Marcelo Martínez De Giorgi, who prosecuted Mórtola without preventive detention and with an embargo of 400 thousand pesos.
The one who did mark a dissent was the chambermaid Pablo Bertuzzi, who voted to revoke the prosecution, dictate lack of merit and deepen the investigation.
However, Bruglia and Llorens considered that “to enable direct contracting, the applicable regulations required the duty of justification, both with respect to the need for specialization and the capacity (scientific, technical or artistic, as the case may be) of the contractor”, something that “from the comparison of the administrative actions it can be concluded was not completed”.
“The technical report invoked only contains generic statements, without enunciating precise and objective data, while it lacks supporting documentation,” concluded the majority ruling of the Federal Chamber against the appeal of the former Macrista official.
The purpose of the contract consisted of obtaining background and technical data for the preparation of the bidding bases to carry out the bidding for the new Port of Buenos Aires Terminals in 2016 and 2017.
Mórtola had come to lead the AGP in January 2016, a few weeks after the assumption of Mauricio Macri, replacing the overseas captain Sergio Borrelli, who had been in charge since July 2012. The appointment occurred on January 30, a month after the accused former Macrista official was appointed deputy controller.
