The former president of the Senate, Ramon Alburquerque (1998-2002) has stated that none of the Odebrecht contracts or those of Andrade Gutierrez, another Brazilian corporation, were approved during the time of his service in the Senate.
He explained he told Attorney General Jean Alain Rodriguez that when the contract for the Northwest Aqueduct was presented on 7 October 1999, during his tenure as president of the Senate, he ordered a study that eventually discovered overvaluations and questioned the design of the project.
As reported in Listin Diario, when asked about whether he knew about the bribes paid by Odebrecht, he replied that every Dominican knew about them. When asked if he had complained about them, he deadpanned that no Dominican complained about corruption pointing to the outcome of unresolved accusations of corruption involving former President Leonel Fernandez and Felix Bautista for the Sun Land corruption case.
He stated that he had voted against each one of the contracts because when the PLD was in power they had never voted in favor of his party’s project and in addition he believed that the designs and many of the evaluations were flawed.
Finally, when asked what they had talked about for the six hours he was inside the Attorney General’s office, he replied that he waited for an hour, then had an hour long lunch and then documents had to be corrected two or three times. The actual interrogation, he said, was not more than an hour to an hour and a half.
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Listin Diario
29 March 2017
