A month after leaving power, Rodríguez Saá defies justice and awards tenders

The outgoing governor of the province of San Luis, Alberto Rodríguez Saá, is moving forward with the distribution of public works, despite warnings from his successor, the governor-elect, Claudio Poggi, and a judge. At the beginning of October, the winner of the provincial elections, representing Juntos por el Cambio, had asked the courts not to allow Rodríguez Saá to open new tenders. At that time, the head of the local court number 2 of the First District, María Eugenia Bona, granted the amparo action and decided to prohibit the governor from new concessions or extensions of existing ones. The objective is that items of the future budgets of Punta del Sol will not be affected, which from December 10 of this year and until December 10, 2027 must have Poggi.From the provincial administration they complained because this measure implied the virtual “paralysis” of all public works and was even going to leave hundreds of construction workers without work. The related unions themselves supported this complaint and went out to picket and protest on the main routes of San Luis.La prohibition covered not only the Executive, but also the autarkic and decentralized bodies, as well as the agencies and societies in which the State intervenes. However, after a couple of weeks of apparent compliance with the ruling, the government opened two tenders on October 31. Number 17/2023 had as participants the companies Rovella Carranza SA and Serving SRL, which fought for the refunctionalization of the southern access of the Villa de Merlo, on Route No. 1, for $ 28,650,000,000. Meanwhile, the firm Semisa submitted itself to tender No. 09/2023 for the new Judicial City for $ 41,321,324,726.The bidders in question were notified of Bona’s ruling and assumed the risk, since it was also established that a financial advance of approximately 30 percent of the total operation would be allocated. This would be equivalent to Rodríguez Saá, weeks away from leaving power, paying 21 billion pesos before the start of construction.” Of course, with the law, with the constitution of the hand, I will have to annul these pharaonic works and denounce the emptying of the State, a looting of the provincial State,” said Poggi, who in any case until December 10 cannot make any decision, except through judicial channels, to prevent it. Another court ruling that upset Rodríguez Saá, and exposed him again to his decline in power after decades of holding it, was the decision of the Superior Court of Justice of the Province that acquitted journalist Diego Masci, who had been convicted of the crime of violation of privacy. The professional had been convicted for publishing in August 2018 a video in which the then Minister of Education, Natalia Spinuzza, appeared confessing to being drugged and drunk during her honeymoon trip through countries Bajos.La justice of first instance and then the High Court itself condemned Masci for having disseminated the video on its website, which the official argued was private. During the trial, Alberto Rodríguez Saá himself was a witness to the lawsuit, and even compared Spinuzza to Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, for his contribution to public education. The defense lawyer appealed to the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, which considered that it had not taken into account that the former minister was a public figure and that, therefore, the arguments used to rule out the violation of freedom of expression were not sufficient to support a criminal conviction. For this reason, he asked the court to review the conviction, a procedure that resulted in the acquittal of the accused. 

Original source in Spanish