The Prosecutor’s Office expanded the criminal investigation against the former mayor of Vitacura, Raúl Torrealba, within the framework of the inquiries by the Vita programs, promoted under his management. In this way, the historical exedil who in the framework of this scandal had to resign from RN will be investigated for the alleged crime of money laundering. So far, the case contained the illicit fraud of subsidies and embezzlement of public funds.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office also decreed the reservation of the criminal case for six months, invoking Law 19,913, which punishes money laundering conduct.
According to La Tercera, sources of the investigation – initiated from a complaint by the current mayor of Vitacura, Camila Merino (Evópoli) – maintained that investigations by the Investigation Police (PDI) yielded an eventual network of “false ticket holders”.
In that network, people appeared providing services for the Vita programs, receiving millionaire amounts from the municipality. However, they would never have worked on them. The fact would allow to refer the background to the Internal Revenue Service (SII) before the facilitation of false tax instruments.
For his part, the chief prosecutor of Santiago, Francisco Jacir, has focused the recent inquiries to establish if there are effective triangulations of money, according to the aforementioned media. The “ghost ticket holders” could have provided ideologically false tax documents. This, in exchange for returning them to the authority that approved the payments.
Background to the case
Mayor Camila Merino announced on August 18 in the City Council the detection of irregularities in municipal development programs (Vita programs).
From the municipality they detected at the end of July possible irregularities in the signatures of a series of documents endorsed by Domingo Prieto. Prieto is former president and legal representative of the Local Sports Council of Vitacura and former representative of Vita Salud and Vita Deportes.
Prieto’s niece, Antonia Larraín, who for 16 years served as an official of the Municipality of Vitacura, and since July 2018 assumed the Directorate of Community Development, issued a compromising testimony for Torrealba.
“As soon as she began to occupy the position, the accused Torrealba told her that every month she would receive from the accused Prieto an envelope with an approximate sum of $ 5,000,000, which effectively occurred until the month of December 2020,” indicates a document from the Prosecutor’s Office.
The suspended official said “that the envelope with money was given to her by Mr. Prieto and on other occasions Arnaldo Cañas or Cesar Silva, sent by Prieto.”
He also added that “every year, for the week of Chileanity, she received from Mr. Prieto a sum of variable money, close to $ 3,000,000, to manage and spend on issues of that celebration, however, normally there were sums close to $ 1,000,000 that she had to deliver in cash to the incumbent mayor Raúl Torrealba. ”
