Mexico City.- A federal judge has charged three former officials of the Federal Board of Conciliation and Arbitration for allegedly seizing ISSSTE bank accounts for more than 589 million pesos in fraudulent labor claims.
Mauricio Urzúa Hernández, a control judge at the Federal Criminal Justice Center in Torreón, Coahuila, prosecuted the former public servants for crimes against the administration of justice, in a modality punishable by 3 to 8 years in prison and payment of a fine of 30 to 1,100 days.
The defendants are Francisco Ayala Borunda, former president of the Special Board Number 42 of the Federal Conciliation and Arbitration, as well as the attorneys Raquel Andrea Hinojosa Martínez and Christian Jesús Montelongo Reza, judicial officials reported. Their trial will be carried out in freedom, since the justice administrator imposed as precautionary measures the prohibition of leaving the country and of approaching witnesses, as well as their periodic presentation before the control unit that supervises the defendants.
The judge set a period of six months for the complementary investigation, time that the FGR and the accused will have to gather the respective evidence that they intend to offer in the procedure.
Borunda will carry out his periodic signature at the Preliminary Measures Unit in Chihuahua, where he now resides, and the actuaries will do so in Torreón.
Modus Operandi
According to reports from the Federal Judicial Branch, the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office for Combating Corruption (FECC) of the FGR accused Borunda and the attorneys of having seized ISSSTE for 589 million 707 thousand 494.6 pesos, so that it would pay hundreds of pensioners compensation that legally no longer exists.
Of the total, the Institute paid 70 million 99 thousand 649.85 pesos and avoided paying the rest thanks to the suspension of the injunctions it filed against the execution of the embargoes. The embargoes were issued between August 4, 2017 and January 28, 2019 in seven labor awards, based on lawsuits filed by pensioners from Mexico City, the State of Mexico, Jalisco and Yucatan, mostly from the federal and state Ministries of Public Education. The federal government denounced these types of labor lawsuits as fraudulent because, according to a jurisprudence issued in 2016 by the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, this benefit should not be included in the calculation of the pension. According to the indictment, Francisco Ayala Borunda, former president of the Special Board Number 42 of the Federal Conciliation and Arbitration, processed these claims in which he ultimately issued the awards against the ISSSTE. The actuaries Raquel Andrea Hinojosa Martínez and Christian Jesús Montelongo Reza allegedly did not properly summon the Institute to respond to the claims, which caused the Special Board to accept the pensioners’ claims as true. Once the ISSSTE lost the lawsuits, Borunda ordered the Institute’s bank accounts to be seized, in this case some intended for payment of medicines, general services for hospitals and doctors’ payrolls, for the payment of the non-existent benefit. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, the then president of the Board asked the bank to issue checks in the name of each worker for the seized amount and then physically delivered them to each pensioner. The chain of this alleged fraud ended at a bank branch in Torreón, where the lawyers went with their retired clients to cash the check. There, a teller deducted between 30 and 35 percent of the legal representatives’ fees. The case of Borunda and the actuaries is just one of the cases prosecuted for this embezzlement. The FGR estimates that the Federal Boards ordered the ISSSTE to pay more than 3 billion pesos, through these fraudulent claims.
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