The latest decorator of the Supreme Court building seems to have been capable of obtaining contracts from politicians. Margarita Gomez worked for Leonel Fernandez and for the departed PRD leader, Jose Francisco Pena Gomez. El Caribe reports that Gomez worked on the house that PRD leader Pena Gomez had in Cambita, San Cristobal. The RD$241.8 million she received to furnish and decorate the Supreme Court Building is just one more stage of the decorator’s journey in and around the government. In the former PLD governmental period the woman received dozens of millions in landscaping government buildings and mega-projects. El Caribe publishes today a tongue-in-cheek description of several millionaire landscaping projects she carried out for the Fernandez government (1996-2000) indicating the short lasting duration of most of these. Among her landscaping jobs were the gardens of the Foreign Office on Independencia Avenue, underneath the overpasses on the 27 de Febrero, the plaza atop the Abraham Lincoln-Winston Churchill tunnel, and the lawns of the Armed Forces Ministry.
After the PLD government, the woman opened her own business called Margarita Gomez, Muebles and Interiors. During the inauguration of the new business, according to the newspaper accounts of the time, the landscaper said that she would sell furnishings and decorations imported and of “a fine quality.”
Guillermo Bonnelly Knipping, the architect that won the tender in 1999 but was superceded by Gomez at the Supreme Court job, told Diario Libre that he thought Gomez was some sort of official under the protection of Deputy Minister Kalil Michel. According to the statements made to Diario Libre, Bonnelly felt that the woman made decisions as if she were the minister and he “was confused, because she was the one that took the reins.”