Former director of the Metropolitan Transport Authority, Hamlet Hermann writing in today’s Hoy, Monday 10 June, describes how everything can be true and a lie. He summarizes the case of the Administrative Higher Court that had issued 15 decisions imposing fines on companies that sold propane gas and adulterated the amounts sold to consumers. “But then, as if pulled out of a magician’s hat, the same court suddenly discovers that the National Consumer Rights Protection Institute (ProConsumidor) does not have the legal right to impose fines on companies at fault. The scam against citizens is a truth that is associated with the relaxed opinion of the judges in benefit of the trickster. Is there apathy, negligence or complicity in this decision? Or in the previous ones?”
He also recalls that on 13 June, the Attorney General announced that he was investigating the Dominican diplomatic passport allegedly obtained by French-Lebanese businessman Zac Takieddine. He appointed assistant prosecutor Jose Amado Cedano to investigate and publish the findings. But, the next day, as if pulled out of a magician’s hat, the Minister of the Armed Forces issued a statement assuring that there was no such passport or any general who had been mentioned by the French justice. The Attorney General had no comments on the authoritarian statement by the armed forces chief. The silence was deafening, he writes. He shares the detail that “a Navy general with 30 years of links to the Minister of Foreign Relations was placed in retirement for length of service.” “The military imposed itself on the justice system in a eminently political blow,” he writes.
In another comment on how justice has been diminished, he comments that the First Collegiate Court of the National District closed the penal action against politicians who are known allies of the government for expiration of the time for the Bahia de las Aguilas case to be heard.
“But what the group of judges did not say was that the term had expired because the judiciary had not acted within the law. That is due to negligence, apathy, complicity or all of the above by the judiciary, the individuals accused of a colossal fraud against the Dominican state were freed from sanction. Not without reason did the Attorney General of the Republic describe the real estate fraud as a ‘great crime against Dominican society.’ But in the case of the diplomatic passport reported in Paris, the Attorney General was ignored by those dubious judges. Another blow to national justice”.
Hermann writes: “What is most evident in those cases is that the official lie becomes the truth. One can highlight, also, how officials do not seem to be aware of the damage that this form of abandoning the standards of the rule of law is causing to Dominican society. More out of arrogance than ignorance, these officials do not want to take into account the accumulative nature of public indignation about actions that protect criminals and are aggressions against society.”
www.hoy.com.do/opiniones/2013/6/9/484345/Todo-es-verdad-y-mentira