Mexico City.- Eduardo Ramírez Aguilar, President of the Senate of the Republic, stressed that, in order to channel more resources to the field of health, especially to meet urgent needs related to the pandemic by the Covid-19 and the lack of hospital supplies, the plenary of the upper house approved the extinction of 109 trusts and public funds. These trusts, he said, are financial instruments, which were originally intended to ensure resources for specific issues, public policies and even for some institutions; however, over time they were deteriorated in their purpose, with an opacity in their administration, leading to acts of corruption.
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Ramírez Aguilar explained that institutions, government orders and sectors of the population that benefited in this way will continue to receive budgetary resources to carry out their activities with transparency, but without intermediary organizations.
Now that budget will be administered with transparency by the different areas of government to directly assist the various beneficiaries such as athletes, relatives of victims of enforced disappearance, filmmakers, victims of natural disasters, among others, commented.
Finally, the Chiapaneco legislator noted that, the supervision of the Higher Audit of the Federation will be decisive for the resources to be channeled and exercised correctly, in compliance with the law, in a transparent and honest manner. For his part, Ricardo Monreal, coordinator of the Parliamentary Group of Morena in the upper house, said that they will continue to attend to scientists, academics, filmmakers, athletes, human rights defenders and all those who benefited from these trusts, but will now be held through the Federation Treasury (TESOFE). The legislator assured that it trusted the word of the President of the Republic, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who stated that none of the beneficiaries would run out of such support. “I believe the President, ” he said. In addition, it detailed that the elimination of these mechanisms would bring two major advantages: a quantitative one, since extraordinary amounts of up to 30% per annum of resources would not be charged in administration costs; and a qualitative one, as there will be transparency and accountability in public spending. Senator Alejandro Armenta Mier, chairman of the Committee on Finance and Public Credit, explained that this reform will allow a bag of more than 68 billion pesos to deal with the effects of the pandemic. He made it clear that there would be no end to support for various sections of the population. In submitting the opinion, he noted that in the period 2000-2018 Federation revenue laws were passed which together meant a source of looting of 3.8 trillion pesos, which were not accredited, “but were intended for public trusts of 70 percent”.
Thus, he accused, in Mexico the system of fiscal and budget looting that is created with public trusts and that generated an industry with phantom companies that in that period issued 9 million apocryphal invoices. Morena’s lawmaker said this reform “ends this stage of looting in the country today” and “the art of disappearing public money is over.” Senator Ana Lilia Rivera Rivera, chairwoman of the Second Legislative Studies Committee, said it does not affect the population that is currently a beneficiary, as they intend to make them believe in the media. The termination of a trust does not make it impossible for the State to directly address its subject matter, he explained. The Senate states that the revisions made by the Federation Superior Audit (ASF) to trusts point to the lack of control, supervision and control of the federal public resources involved, which make them a kind of “invisible public money”. In addition, the ASF found that trusts are under no obligation to be transparent, accountable, and record egress and income into the account in the Egress Budget or any other public register, it also found discretion and open opacity in its handling, guidelines and delivery of unstructed information, among other observations. In the text, it is made clear that the extinction of these figures in no way means eradicating support and the destination of resources to different sectors of our country. The proposal is aimed at eradicating the opacity and corruption that was used through the figure of the trust, underlined.
