In an interview for Proceso Magazine, the former director of the Institute to Return the Stolen to the People, Jaime Cárdenas, said that he found himself in the dilemma of resigning or obeying the president and violating the law.
Cárdenas said that before the impossibility of cashing a check for 2 billion pesos that the FGR delivered for the raffle for the presidential plane –money that had to be returned to Infonavit–, López Obrador ordered the then director of the Institute replace that money “from anywhere”. This one did so. He even used the confiscated drug dealer. But the president wanted more. Faced with the risk of engaging in illegal acts and ending up in jail, Cárdenas resigned. In an interview with Proceso, he offers details of those events that led to his departure from INDEP and the presidential anger.
Cárdenas Gracia assumed the leadership of INDEP on June 2, 2020, amid pressure to obtain, by any means, resources to carry out what was called the “presidential plane raffle”, maneuvers that began four months before his arrival.
On February 10, 2020, the president exhibited, as a great triumph, the check for 2 billion pesos that the Attorney General of the Republic, Alejandro Gertz Manero, gave him, and assured that they would be to pay for the plane raffle prizes. presidential election, a raffle that distributed cash, but not the aircraft, which until now has not been able to be sold.
“That money was never used (…) INDEP legally could not use the money if it was not a confiscated, abandoned, extinct or insured asset and that check was not in any of the four categories,” Cárdenas Gracia points out to Proceso.
Those 2 billion pesos, which López Obrador and Gertz Manero boasted, were “recovered” under the phrase “fighting corruption” and were related to a compensation agreement for early termination of a contract between Infonavit and real estate businessmen. : the brothers Max and André El Mann and the brothers Rafael and Teófilo Zaga Tawil, the latter imprisoned in the Altiplano prison, accused of illegally obtaining funds from the housing institute.
This delivery of resources, which earned applause from the chief executive before the media, was riddled with irregularities: the first, that the money was not even in the possession of the FGR at the time it was presented at the morning conference in National Palace. Gertz Manero and López Obrador posed smiling for the photo, holding up a bad check.
the presidential order
The order to use the money to cover the prizes for the presidential plane raffle was the responsibility of Cárdenas’s predecessor, Ricardo Rodríguez, but neither of them could dispose of that money, so they had to return to Infonavit due to the irregularities in the process.
The failure to deliver the FGR check for the raffle and its return to Infonavit caused the president to ask Cárdenas to replace those 2 billion pesos “from anywhere”, since the director of INDEP had already said that it could not be dispose of them.
“You can’t use that Infonavit money, so now look for it and find it,” was López Obrador’s blunt instruction.
The complete information can be read in the 2411 edition of the Proceso magazine.
