translated from Spanish: Army engaged member of the Supreme Court lawyer to address the “crisis of the passages”

the work was to address the crisis triggered millionaires irregular payment of fares and freight rates to generals and colonels, according to info ion collected by the team of investigative journalism “Correspondent”. “Among my clients the Commander is Chief of the army, who advised since the end of October 2018, fees. The own Matus, not advised to any other Member or ex-member of the institution”, confirmed by email, although after this publication, the lawyer decided to give up this advice. The jurist, who ruled that their fees are financed with booked expenses, said that legal support is limited only to the review of procedures and regulations, to prevent future fraud. However, the army itself correspondent journalistic research center delivered a report that Matus examined the legality of the diversion of public funds, through the purchase of tickets. “Commissioned by the Commander in Chief have reviewed the report of special research 01/2018 section fares and freight of the command of army personnel”, wrote the Member of the Supreme Court at this writing. Matus, who was Dean of the school of law of the University of Chile candidate, concluded in its report that “in the measure that not any obvious abuses in the use of resources allocated to commissions for services”, the military could request return monies improperly incurred through “discount for return or (even) a rebate or remission”. According to the lawyer, the State may waive recover eventually embezzled money, since the military could claim “have incurred in a just cause of error”, since misuse of the passages was a common practice. “It’s an error in the institution, which should be taken into account when determining administrative responsibilities”, proposed the lawyer. The report, prepared after several meetings between Matus and the Commander in Chief of the army, Gen. Ricardo Martínez, added the need that this military institution to instruct a summary investigation into the facts, through Headquarters staff. The objective of this research should be – according to the report by Matus – achieve a proper accountability, after years in which the military had arbitrarily funds for passages which even used to travel to Disneyland, with their wives and children. In courts, the Minister on visit Romy Rutherford continued this week to make progress in the investigation into fraud on this issue, interviewing Alejandro Villagra, one of the six members of the Generalate whose heritage is investigated by the military justice. The facts occur in moments in which the Prosecutor – in another case – asked police deliver all available information on the foreign travel of 130 generals, paid for with public funds. In addition, information provided by the air force to correspondent confirmed that this branch of Defense doubled its spent on travel and travel expenses over the past decade. In figures, in per diem payments to official spent 575 million dollars in 2011 to 1,024 million in 2017, the item of service commissions (see document 2). Total spending on these operations, meanwhile, went from 1.910 billion pesos to 3.092 million. To these figures must be added disbursements in dollars. Meanwhile, the Navy refused to deliver information through the transparency law, despite being operations financed with public funds, claiming that it would take five years in collecting it.

Original source in Spanish