translated from Spanish: Alistan formalization of 800 active and retired military personnel for fraud that would reach $3 billion

Chile’s Aysén regional prosecutor Carlos Palma enlists the formalization of some 800 active and retired military personnel for fraud within the Army worth about $3 billion. The investigation began in 2018 and, according to the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Investigative Police (POI), public funds were earmarked to pay private debts, according to ‘El Mercurio’. Palma has already led in 2018 a registration in the Personnel, Telecommunications and Finance Management Commands of the Army Headquarters in Santiago. So there were just over 300 military personnel investigated. The fraud was carried out through fee contracts or payment of salaries to retired personnel and service commissions that were not made, but where there was a payment as compensation for individual economic losses, all following the term of the FAM or Mutual Aid Fund, an informal system of solidarity aid operating in Coyhaique since 1950 and which was annulled by the Army in 2006.” Once the Mutual Aid Fund was closed, measures were implemented to alleviate the harm caused to officials and at first those measures were within the regulatory and legal framework, which was to make service commissions or prioritize those who had been economically harmed,” Palma explained in 2018, in statements collected by RLN.” However, and that is what is being investigated from a criminal point of view, at some point the service commissions were decreed and paid but not done; the employment contracts that were signed did not carry out the work in practice, therefore there was unjustifiable outing of money, and in some cases, extension of post-retirement benefits to a longer term than was legally permitted,” he said. Penalties for the crime of tax fraud, depending on the amounts and repetition in the facts, range from 541 days of imprisonment to crime sentences, i.e. more than five years and one day in prison.

Original source in Spanish