translated from Spanish: Police fraud: Prosecutor’s Office review proceedings against accused 33

The Prosecutor Eugenio Campos began Wednesday the reformalizacion of charges of 33 police officers and civilians charged in fraud of public funds to the interior of Carabineros, valued at more than 28 billion pesos.
According to judicial sources, hearings in the seventh Court of warranty of Santiago will prolong for five days and will allow prosecutors to clarify the facts and provide new background on the crimes attributed to the accused.
Among the 33 police and civilians will be reformalizados are retired generals Flavio Echeverría and Iván Whipple, the two senior police officers involved in the case, in which there are more than 135 defendants.
Echeverria and Whipple were in charge of the Department of finance police between 2006 and 2016, when the millionaire embezzlement occurred in the institution.
The prosecution accuses defendants of crimes of embezzlement of public funds, conspiracy, money laundering, forgery and counterfeit public instrument.
Attorney fields said at the hearing of reformalizacion that defendants took advantage of the lack of internal controls and used their positions and access to institutional accounts to divert the tax funds.
“The Association could use at your convenience various current accounts institutional, transferring funds from each other and hiding the money that had been removed by pretending that these amounts corresponded to salaries, per diem, evictions and other false motives,”said.
The investigation of the fraud, the largest in the history of police, began following the report of a bank unit of financial analysis (UAF) by a suspicious transaction of money under the new laws of money laundering.
The UAF believed that it could be a transaction related to drug trafficking and alerted the unit specializing in such offences from police, which found that a sum of close to 300 million pesos had been deposited into the account of a Lieutenant of the institution.
More than thirty of the accused are in custody from 2017. The term that has the Prosecutor’s Office to investigate the facts ends next March.

Original source in Spanish