Dozens of Employees of the Company in Charge of Cleanliness of Havana Detained

Some of the managers of the company in charge of collecting and treating waste in Havana are in provisional detention. (14ymedio)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Havana, 14January 2019 — A hundred employees of the Communal Resources of Havana Company are involved in a new case of financial fraud and face charges of embezzlement, falsification of documents and “spread of diseases” as published this Monday in Cubanet, which cites sources linked to the state agency.

Some managers of the company in charge of collecting and treating waste products have been in provisional detention as of the end of 2018, when the Prosecutor’s Office of Havana opened an investigation of more than a dozen high-ranking officials as a result of inspections and audits ordered by government.

The authorities detected anomalies in the records of several units, especially those in charge of the collection of solid waste.

“There is talk of payments higher than 20 or 30 Cuban pesos per cubic meter of garbage pick-up when the standard should be between 10 and 15 pesos (…), the volumes of trashed collected aren’t what they should be. According to the figures that exists today in the records, there shouldn’t be a single piece of paper thrown in the streets and on the contrary, what you see is a horror,” a source from the Municipal Administration of Finance of Arroyo Naranjo told Cubanet.

The same source states that there are other irregularities such as employee numbers and inflated wages or fraud in hiring.

The official press has not mentioned the investigation, which is ongoing. The Prosecutor’s Office could request sentences of up to 10 years, like in prior cases, Cubanet affirms.

In 2009, the Government created the Office of the Comptroller General of the Republic to stop corruption and the diversion of resources. In 2017, in the 361 entities supervised by comptroller Gladys Bejerano Portela, economic losses amounting to more than one million pesos and 47 criminal acts were detected, implicating 1,265 individuals.

In 2011, Raul Castro asserted that “corruption is today one of the main enemies of the Revolution, much more harmful than the subversive and interventionist activity of the United States Government and its allies inside and outside the country.”

Translated by Wilfredo Díaz Echevarria

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