Many acquisitions of the 4T are fraudulent

Let’s review the story:

Pride of the neoliberal Administration of President Ernesto Zedillo, the Compranet program is the electronic procurement system of the Mexican federal government, originally developed in the 1990s by the then Secretary of Finance and Public Credit, José Ángel Gurria Treviño and the Secretary of Comptroller’s Office and Administrative Development, Arsenio Farell Cubillas.

The undersecretary of the then called SECODAM, Octavio López Presa, and his unit chief Carlos Jaso participated.

Its main objective was to modernize and make transparent the public sector’s procurement and contracting processes, promoting efficiency, fair competition and reducing corruption.

Before the emergence of this system, government procurement processes in Mexico were highly bureaucratic, slow and opaque, which facilitated corrupt practices and favoritism in the awarding of contracts.

Compranet enabled government tenders and purchases to be managed electronically, which offered several benefits:

To begin with, transparency in processes, stimulation of competition and the presence of more actors to participate in tenders, reduced the time needed to carry out tenders and contracts, making them more agile and effective.

The system generated a historical record of government purchases, allowing for better analysis and planning of future acquisitions.

Compranet represented a major shift towards the digitalization of Mexican government processes, which included electronic signatures and electronic envelopes to prevent fraud by altering bids and was part of the e-government initiatives promoted at that time.

It has received international recognition, including the Global Bangemann Challenge, for being a successful model in the modernization of public management.

It worked with perfection, reaching 99 percent effectiveness during the last PRI six-year term and the first of the two PAN six-year terms.

However, not everything could be perfect…

The height of fraud, with Thalía Lagunes

During the six-year term of Felipe Calderón, following the policies of privatization of all services, including the unfortunate cases of Enciclomedia, the failed technological projects of the IMSS and the looting of this Institute with the technological company Tata, where even Xóchitl Gálvez, as a subcontractor, was implicated…

…the big creative technology guys of the Public Service Secretariat, headed by Salvador Vega Casillas and Rafael Morgan Ríos, as well as an obscure head of the Compranet unit, Javier Dávila Pérez, awarded an outsourcing contract for the Compranet System to a private company called Bravo Solutions, which, until two years ago, provided the service.

So far, so good, the spokesmen of neoliberalism would say. However, they granted a procurement system that was only a copy of the original.

That is, they allowed since then, around 2012, an exceedingly small group of officials, in collusion with employees of Bravo Solutions –taking advantage of “back doors” in the software of the new system–, to obtain income for themselves, by altering technical and economic proposals and, among other “niceties”, extracting documents. And this continued during the corrupt six-year term of Enrique Peña.

In the recently concluded López Obrador administration, these deals were not foreign to the officials who oversaw the acquisitions, after Raquel Buenrostro left the SHCP’s Chief Officer’s Office when she was promoted to president of the SAT. Originally, she was in charge of purchasing the medicines by AMLO… now scarcer and much more expensive due to corrupt practices.

These officials, headed by Thalía Lagunes, reached their peak in the 4T, especially in the consolidated sectoral tenders for leasing cars, patrol cars, ambulances, etc. and medicines, among many others.

Initially, through Alberto Olivas, they operated in collusion with employees of Bravo Solutions, in parallel developing their own version of Compranet.

Of course, why share, if Lagunes and Olivas were the owners of the circus.

Buenrostro, now in his new role as head of the Secretariat of Public Function, mentioned “the pigsty” that he found in the Compranet system, not only the one from Bravo Systems, but also in the imitation of this falsification that Alberto Olivas’ programmers made, and that his contract promotion agency made its own.

It is well known that there were cases in which the offers were altered in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl by friends of Olivas, who was already in charge of Compranet, but in the version that he directed, he only copied the screens from the Bravo system and replaced it.

Of course, leaving the “back doors” open to alter and allow cronies like Carlos Mercado, José Trejo, Reyna Basilio , the latter still active in the ISSSTE, to help create future savings for this time of drought, like now, when they are already in the banking sector.

Everything happened before the pusillanimous gaze of Roberto Saucedo , who only watched them pass by, but did not want to get into trouble with the then President López Obrador.

Crimes are also committed by omission, Mr. Roberto.

Clues

Although it was not systemic, the fraudulent Compranet of the Fourth Transformation was also used by the already famous “diabolical quintet” of the IMSS, under the orders of Zoé Robledo. From time to time, Borsalino González, Eduardo Thomas , Jorge de Anda, Daniel Esteban Ramírez, and Carina Sarmiento went to Thalía Lagunes in search of support for their scams with the acquisition of medical supplies. * * * That’s all for today. I acknowledge that you have read this far and, as always, I wish you good thanks and many, many days!

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