The director of Diario Libre hosted Yokasta Guzman, the head of the office that grants government contracts, on the Dialogo Libre program over the weekend of 24-25 August. Guzman said that her agency has set up controls aimed at preventing criminal action on public tenders. She admitted that companies are being created in order to take advantage of some benefits that the government is offering small and medium companies, through the tenders for different projects.
When questioned about reports that some businesspeople and politicians might be creating two and three companies to win the tenders, she answered: “This has been reported, in part they are right.” Guzman said they were taking measures to prevent this unfair practice, such as verifying that the partners are not the same and they are applying a crossing of the databases of the Chamber of Commerce, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, the Directorate of Internal Taxes, the Treasury of Social Security and the Registry of State Suppliers.
“When we carry out this cross-referencing, the first thing that we find is that seven companies are based in the same place. And when we go to the place, they are not there, nor do they have what Law 488-08 calls an ‘economically productive unit,’ that for me, there is everything related with the Micro, Small and Medium Companies (Mipymes),” she said. Guzman explained that Law 488-08 that creates regulations or the development and competitiveness of the Mipymes, establishes what the categories are that qualify or not as such, but also, it orders that 20% of the budgets that are used for the purchases and public contracts should be directed to that sector.