A federal judge will decide on Wednesday, November 3, whether to grant another extension to the former director of Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), Emilio Lozoya, to gather evidence in his favor, or if he orders the investigation phase to be closed to initiate the trial against him in the case Odebrecht.
It is expected that the Federal Public Ministry will request during the hearing to speed up the trial against Lozoya. A year and a half ago, the former official arrived in Mexico extradited from Spain, and since then he has requested extensions of time to respond to the accusation against him of the General Prosecutor of the Republic (FGR) of receiving millionaire bribes from Odebrecht.
On October 11, before Lozoya’s public appearance in a luxurious restaurant in Mexico City, the General Prosecutor of the Republic in charge of Alejandro Gertz Manero presumed that it was thanks to his investigation that Lozoya is under criminal proceedings for the cases Odebrecht and Agronitrogenados.
“Since 2017, the most serious international corruption scandal in Latin America, called Odebrecht, had been frozen in the Office of the Attorney General of the Republic, without any progress; and it was until 2019, when the new Attorney General’s Office investigated the case, which was ratified by Pemex, as well as the Agronitrogenados matter, in which Emilio “L” was one of the main culprits, ”he argued.
In a complaint he filed last year, Lozoya accuse the former president Enrique Peña Nieto and the former Secretary of the Treasury, Luis Videgaray, of knowing and allowing a bribery network for at least 10 million dollars from Odebrecht, which was supposedly destined to the PRI electoral campaign in 2012 and to payments to opposition legislators to approve the energy reform.
In his first court hearing in 2020, the former director of Mexican oil He pleaded not guilty to having received bribes in millions of dollars from the Brazilian company Odebrecht, in exchange for delivering construction contracts to said Brazilian company.
However, the FGR He denounced that Gilda Austin de Lozoya, mother of the former director of Pemex, received in her bank accounts resources for $ 185,000 and $ 1,200,000, which allegedly had an illicit origin and were used to acquire a house in Ixtapa, Zihuatanejo.
The Prosecutor’s Office argues that when Lozoya took over as director of Pemex, in his statement of assets he said that he was the owner of a bank account together with his mother. As well as another bank account in Germany.
The FGR notes that Emilio Lozoya met the former director of Odebrecht in Mexico, Luis Alberto de Meneses Weyll, whom he allegedly favored to obtain public works contracts.
kg
Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx