Tonty Rutinel Dominguez (PRD-Province of Santo Domingo) blasted former Duarte province senator Julio Gonzalez (Machacho) for selling his senate seat to former director of the Presidential Public Works Supervisory Office, Hernani Salazar. Rutinel said he would request a disciplinary session at the next meeting of senators on Tuesday. He accused Salazar of paying RD$40 million for the seat, and said that former President Hipolito Mejia himself negotiated the deal, as reported in the Listin Diario.
He described Salazar as a man without morals. He challenged Salazar to sue him such as Salazar has done with Marino Vinicio Castillo. “What Vincho has said about Salazar is little, because he is a man capable of anything and gets into everything,” he said.
Rutinel said that the PRD was directed by a group of incapable people that are now organizing a party convention to negotiate impunities with President Leoenl Fernandez. He said he does not feel represented by any of the politicians that he said stole money from the Dominican people. He accused former President Hipolito Mejia of sinking the economy and then ordering that the bonds and laws to facilitate the agreement with the IMF not be approved.
Rutinel, as reported in the Listin Diario, revealed that former President Mejia and economist Jaime Aristy Escuder discussed in the home of president of the PRD Vicente Sanchez Baret the virtues of not approving the bonds so as not to contribute to Fernandez, that if they did the senators would be responsible for the PRD losing the 2006 congressional and municipal elections and the presidential elections in 2008. In the meeting, as reported by Orlando Gil of the Listin Diario earlier, Tonty Rutinel asked Aristy Escuder where was he when Mejia was ruining the economy. Aristy was one of the leading Mejia economic advisers.
Rutinel said that President Fernandez rejected what he called a “macabre plan of two or three senators that are willing through extortion to keep the country up in the air. That cannot be.”
Rutinel sympathizes with the Hatuey de Camps proposal that Fernandez should reach a consensus by meeting with each senator separately so as to approve Executive Branch initiatives sent to Congress.
When asked by the press about statements by Rutinel, Hernani Salazar, said: “I will not lose my time responding to Tony. I respect myself.”
Meanwhile, former senator Julio Gonzalez said that he left the senate because of health reasons. He said that he was happy to leave because politics in this country is marked by clientelism. He denied the sale saying that then the board of the party that presented his replacements, as well as the senators that voted for Hernani.