After former Vice President Milagros Ortiz Bosch, who is the director of Ethics Agency for the Abinader administration, was open about saying that the government’s director of titling of assets should have taken a license, Merido Torres says he will do so. On Tuesday, 4 April 2023 he held a press conference to make the announcement. He has not set a date.
Torres is a high-ranking ruling Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM) activist. He aspires to be the party candidate to mayor in Santo Domingo East. Torres is presently the director of the Technical Executing Unit for the Titling of State Lands (Utect). He said he will take a leave of absence so that the prosecutors can investigate his involvement in criminal acts related to the Operacion Squid corruption case.
Torres is mentioned several times as one of the persons benefiting from the alleged wheeling and dealing scams included in the Operation Squid corruption case that focuses on irregularities happening mostly at the Ministry of Hacienda during the peak months of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, under the guise of collecting money for the political campaign of then ruling political party, Gonzalo Castillo.
The director of the Integrity & Ethics Agency, Ortiz Bosch had said the day before that Torres has been under investigation for two months. Torres instead had said that nobody had asked for his resignation and he was nor resigning, as what he had done in the expropriations scam mention was just part of his usual work as a private lawyer.
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Listin Diario
Diario Libre
El Dia
DR1 News
10 April 2023