national

Officials to testify in statue case

LA PRENSA

questioned: Investigators plan to summon all government officials with ties to the missing “Juegos de Antaño” monument.1092029

Marcelina Godoy, the director of Patrimonio Histórico, is among several government officials under investigation by anti-corruption prosecutors looking into the disappearance of the 42-piece monument, “Juegos de Antaño,” said Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez.

Gómez clarified that all officials found to have connections to the sculptures will be summoned to give a sworn statement as part of the first phase of investigations. The next phase will involve intelligence work carried out by the Dirección de Investigación Judicial, she added.

Because of the gravity of the potential charges, the attorney general explained that the Ministerio Público must be very careful to follow procedures correctly, particularly since laws prevent the admittance of information given by functionaries previously.

“What happens is that first you have to collect all of the [work’s] history: who decided to move the pieces, why and where they were moved, who received them, where is the inventory and record, who was the last person who saw, who exercises oversight and control and who had the keys to the warehouse,” specified Gómez.

In a preliminary interview with prosecutors last week, Patrimonio Histórico director Marcelina Godoy denied that her office had anything to report, and claimed that they were not liable for the sculpture.

For her part, executive secretary of the Consejo Nacional de Transparencia contra la Corrupción, Alma Montenegro de Fletcher, was incisive in stating that investigators must determine precisely what happened and commented that “if officials are involved, they must be punished.”

She agreed with the attorney general in that the investigation should be allowed to reach its logical conclusion, even if it exposed government officials in the process, because, as First Lady Vivian de Torrijos stated, the bronze figures couldn’t have walked out of the Parque Omar warehouse on their own.