A dead witness, a reparation agreement that does not come to fruition and negotiations that do not end. The case of Emilio Lozoya, one of the emblems of the anti-corruption fight of the Government of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is bogged down without a clear destination. This Friday a hearing was scheduled for the case for the purchase of Agronitrogenados, in which the former director of Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) is accused of criminal association and operations with resources of illicit origin. To get rid of the judicial process, his lawyer has said that they were seeking to reach an agreement with the oil company and pay 3.4 million dollars to compensate for the economic damage. But the judge decided to defer the hearing for 10 days due to the death of Edgar Torres, a former Pemex official and a key witness, and has left Lozoya’s judicial status on hold for now.
The move has given a few days of air to the former director of Pemex, who has wanted for months to close a reparation agreement. In the previous hearing, last April, Lozoya was on the verge of agreeing on a figure with the oil company, but it was President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador who ordered at the last minute to stop the agreement and carry out an audit to calculate the damage caused to the coffers. public. As explained this Friday by the defense attorney, Miguel Ontiveros, Lozoya has always maintained the position of collaborating with the Attorney General’s Office. “To conclude the reparation agreement, the judge has granted us this period,” he said.
The formal reason for the postponement was the death of a key witness for Lozoya’s defense, in addition to the request to review more than 3,000 sheets of evidence presented by the Prosecutor’s Office in recent days. In this case, he is accused of having allowed the purchase of a fertilizer plant at a premium by the state oil company in January 2014 from the Altos Hornos steel company, in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes paid by the company.
Torres, who apparently died at home of a heart attack, was a subordinate of Lozoya who was in charge of Pemex Fertilizers, a company created from the energy reform of Enrique Pena Nieto. For some close to the cause, who prefer to remain anonymous, this man was the “collaborator who helped him structure the acquisition of the plant” of Agronitrogenados. However, they describe as “a mockery” that the hearing for his death has been postponed, because they consider him more than a witness, “a collaborator” of the former director of Pemex. In addition, they point out that all the movements of the purchase of the plant were recorded in “a world of papers” and that “there are plenty of documents” proving the crime.
For this same reason, the businessman Alonso Ancira agreed to pay a reparation agreement of 216.6 million dollars to get rid of the accusation of operations with resources of illicit origin that the Prosecutor’s Office established for him. The largest shareholder of the powerful Grupo Acerero del Norte, owner of Altos Hornos, then admitted having made those bribes to Lozoya, an affirmation that falls like stone on the defense of the former director of Pemex.
Next Monday Lozoya will have to return to court to face a hearing on this occasion for the Odebrecht case, the other legal case that has kept him in prison for a year. In this process, he is accused of having orchestrated a network of bribes paid by the Brazilian construction company to receive benefits and carry out the energy reform. Faced with this accusation, Lozoya requested access to an opportunity criterion that would give him benefits in exchange for collaborating with justice.
The lawyer Adriana Greaves, from Tojil, stresses that if they reach a reparation agreement or obtain a criterion of opportunity, Lozoya and the Prosecutor’s Office “would be reaching an illegal agreement” because they are not benefits that can be applied in this type of accusation. “The crimes of corruption were designed so that they did not fall into these figures,” she points out. An example of this agreement that is not contemplated in the law is Ancira’s own in the Agronitrogenados case. “It is that there is only a simulation, they say: ‘we are persecuting corruption’, but in reality they are simulating justice”.
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