Documents would involve officials of Mexican President López Obrador in the Odebrecht case

The Mexican Association Against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI) revealed official documents that would involve current Mexican government officials in the Brazilian bribery scandal odebrecht that impacted previous administrations.

MCCI accessed the file of the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) that includes Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, current head of advisers to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and Leonardo Cornejo Serrano, in charge of building the new Dos Bocas refinery. Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex).

The FGR published the censored documents after an order from the National Transparency Institute (INAI), but the organization obtained the declassified files, according to its report.

“Among the censored information there are documents that involve current federal officials, such as the case of Leonardo Cornejo Serrano, director of the Dos Bocas refinery, who in the past six-year term intervened in the assignment of a work in Tula to Odebrecht,” he reported. the Asociation.

In addition, the organization mentioned that “information referring to a work that Odebrecht executed in Michoacán when Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, current head of advisers to the president, was governor of that state.”

The current government of López Obrador has promised to investigate Odebrecht’s bribes, which totaled more than US$20 million in the governments of Vicente Fox (2000-2006), Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) and Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018). .

The main implicated, the former director of Pemex Emilio Lozoya (2012-2016), has been in preventive detention since last November for allegedly receiving US $ 10.5 million from Odebrecht during the campaign and the presidency of Peña Nieto.

López Obrador has accused these bribes of being behind the energy reform that opened the sector to private investment in 2013, for which former senator Jorge Luis Lavalle, of the opposition National Action Party (PAN), is also in preventive detention.

But the file published this Monday also involves officials who are now in this government.

In particular, MCCI revealed a letter sent by Cornejo Serrano, who is also deputy director of Industrial Projects at Pemex, “in which he invites the director of Odebrecht, Luis Weyll, to present a quote for the Tula (refinery) project that was negotiated with bribes”.

The FGR, led by Alejandro Gertz Manero, close to López Obrador, had hidden the name of Cornejo Serrano.

The prosecution had also completely censored “the Odebrecht documents on a work he carried out in Michoacán, when that state was governed by Lázaro Cárdenas Batel.”

MCCI denounced that the FGR “hid the relevant information that allows knowing those involved in this corruption plot.”

According to the organization, these are just the first five volumes of the Odebrecht file, which “consists of dozens of volumes and annexes,” and that the prosecution promised to publish “gradually.”