The embezzlement of public funds for which a pair of former officials from the Sonora Secretariat of Education and Culture (SEC) were charged by the state Attorney General’s Office last week reportedly drained nearly 290 million pesos from public coffers, the anti-corruption prosecutor reported Wednesday. The case involves other Sonora political figures whose arrest warrants are pending execution.
“The case of the two former public servants who were charged (José Víctor González Guerrero, former head of the SEC from 2011 to 2021, and Francisco Alberto Curiel Montiel) is the result of an investigation that began in September 2021, through which events were reported that several public servants, starting in 2018 and during the fiscal years of 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021, diverted funds claiming the existence of a multiple benefits scheme. (…) A scheme was contracted, supposedly to provide greater benefits to some workers. The amount of the embezzlement is almost 290 million pesos,” reported Mauricio Ibarra Romo, head of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office of the State of Sonora.
The official explained that the investigation began in September 2021, that is, during the first days of Alfonso Durazo Montaño’s administration. The two former officials involved in the case were part of Claudia Pavlovich Arellano’s cabinet, who currently holds a controversial embassy in Panama.
In addition to the two public servants currently detained at the Social Reintegration Center 1 in Hermosillo, the case resulted in a series of arrest warrants that are still pending execution, as confirmed by Ibarra Romo.
A document leaked to the press during the trial details that the remaining arrest warrants were issued against Cristina Rodeles Valdez, Gabriel Alejandro Barranco Varela, Juan Antonio Fernández Ortiz, and Ernesto de Lucas Hopkins.
All worked at the SEC, but the latter’s case stands out because he was head of the Secretariat from 2015 to 2018, and in 2008 he was director of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) of Sonora, and private secretary to former Governor Eduardo Bours Castelo. In 2022, he joined the Citizens’ Movement, a party that helped him secure a seat as a deputy in the Sonora State Congress.
“During the four fiscal years, they diverted funds from allocation 1000, personal services, for other purposes. They partnered with a private company, and it was to this company that the public funds were deposited. This is very clear: the expenditure budget must be used exactly for what it was approved for, and in this case, it was used for other purposes,” concluded the anti-corruption prosecutor.
Source: proceso
