Mexico City.- The federal justice system initiated two criminal proceedings for organized crime and money laundering against Juan Bautista Rojas Fontes, former budget control manager in the Administration and Finance Unit of Segalmex.
The former official was already arrested for the alleged simulated purchase and sale of sugar for 142 million pesos and for the alleged collection of a “moche” of 4 million pesos, through the “façade” company Film & Marketing 18k, controlled by René Federico Gavira Martínez, son of René Gavira, former director of Administration and Finance at Segalmex and currently in prison.
In both processes, Rojas Fontes was given justified preventive detention, which he is serving in the Altiplano Federal Penitentiary, in Almoloya de Juárez, State of Mexico.
In the first process, he is accused of having been one of the officials who authorized payments of 142 million pesos to the company Servicios Integrales Carregín, for a contract for 7,840 tons of sugar that presumably were never delivered to Segalmex.
In the second, he is accused of a “moche” of 4 million that they would have paid to Diconsa officials for contracts of 200 million pesos.
They ask for a higher penalty in the Segalmex case
The Attorney General’s Office (FGR) requested that Édgar Alejandro Armenta Peralta be sentenced to 55 years in prison, identified as the alleged namesake of the recently deceased businessman Alejandro Puente Córdoba, in one of the processes opened by the Segalmex case.
These are the contracts to dehydrate raw milk, in which Segalmex would have been embezzled with 1,687 million pesos by two suppliers who apparently charged without delivering the processed products and did not return the raw materials provided by the government entity.
Armenta was arrested in April 2023 in Mexico City and prosecuted for the crimes of organized crime and money laundering; Thanks to new jurisprudence that prohibits ex officio preventive detention – a measure provided for the first of these crimes – last February he was provisionally released from the Altiplano Penitentiary.
In the indictment, presented before the judge in the case, federal prosecutor Sergio Ortiz Tamayo asked to sentence Armenta to 40 years in prison for the crime of organized crime and 15 years for money laundering, in addition to a fine of 17 thousand 500 days of your salary.
He also asked to impose a reprimand and the suspension of civil and political rights.
The Prosecutor’s Office offered 21 testimonies and 10 documentaries to try to demonstrate at trial the guilt of Alejandro Puente’s alleged front man.
This is so far the highest penalty that has been requested against any of those involved in the Segalmex Case, largely because the crime of organized crime is highly punishable and Armenta is one of the few who have advanced to the last stages of the process. .
There are other defendants in the Segalmex case against whom the FGR has already presented its accusation and asked to impose a sentence on them, but these are different processes and for low-penalty crimes.
One of them is the case of the alleged illegal purchase of stock securities with a value of 700 million pesos, in which the FGR requested that René Gavira Segreste, until now the highest-level official accused, be sentenced to 12 years in prison. prison for the crime of illicit use of powers and powers.
Scam
The FGR names Armenta as the front man of Alejandro Puente, former director of the National Chamber of the Cable Telecommunications Industry (Canitec), based on statements from collaborating witnesses.
In the case known as the “dairy scam”, the accusation points to two companies that signed supposedly fraudulent contracts with Segalmex, one is Grupo Vicente Suárez 73 and the other Comercializadora de Productos Lácteos de la Laguna (Coprolac).
The decentralized organization awarded them agreements for 435 million pesos and gave them raw milk with a total value of 1,252 million pesos, so that they could process it and deliver powdered milk and cream.
However, according to the Prosecutor’s Office, everything was a simulation to divert resources, because the suppliers collected and dispersed the money and did not return the raw materials.
“Edgar Alejandro Armenta Peralta, in his capacity as legal representative of Grupo Vicente Suárez 73, also has management functions within the criminal group, since he was the person in charge of celebrating and signing all the general collaboration agreements, as well as the settlement minutes. with which the resources belonging to Liconsa and Diconsa were illicitly obtained,” says the indictment.
The presumption that Armenta is a name-taker is based mainly on the testimony of Ricardo José Lambretón López Ostolaza, a businessman who admitted being an accomplice of Alejandro Puente and who later managed to become a collaborating witness for the FGR.
Lambretón stated before a judge that Puente paid bribes of 6.7 million pesos to Gavira Segreste, former head of the Administration and Finance Unit of Segalmex, to assign contracts to Grupo Vicente Suárez 73, with which on paper the businessman had no no link.
Lambretón even said that he himself took the cash from those bribes to Gavira Segreste’s house, on Puente’s instructions.
A verifiable fact is that on November 11, 2014, Alejandro Puente and Raymundo Miravete Melo incorporated the Grupo Vicente Suárez 73 construction company before Notary Public 16 of Mexico City.
But on December 3, 2018, both sold their shares to Armenta and Alejandra Escamilla Yesaki, who changed their purpose to convert the company into a dairy supplier.
On behalf of the company, Armenta celebrated and signed all the general collaboration agreements and the settlement minutes with which Segalmex was allegedly embezzled.
“It is possible to conclude that these moral companies served as front companies, which were modified expressly to simulate contracts with parastatals, with the purpose of obtaining resources illicitly and subsequently dispersing them through a series of operations within the financial system,” The document says the accusation against Armenta.
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