Ex-minister’s changing story

THE MINISTER of Public Security in the administration of Ricardo Martinelli (2009-2014),José Raúl Mulino is still in preventive detention pending the result of an appeal to a judge’s decision to change the restraining order to house arrest while he awaits trial in connection with a controversial radar purchase from a subsidiary of Italian defense consortium, Finmecannica.

According to La Prensa  Mulino has changed his story several times concerning the purchase that he signed in 2010.

“I was a minister, I did not obey others,” said the minister shortly after leaving office. “I vouch for everything I signed.”

That interview with granted shortly after his successor, Álvaro Alvarado, made allegations of cost overruns in the ministry, including with the contract for the radars.

In later interviews, Mulino would change his stance.

“I signed contracts following cabinet orders,” he said.

That view would change again, this time blaming Juan Carlos Varela, who was vice president and foreign minister at the start of the Martinelli government, and who was replaced  after a bitter falling out between them. That falling out gave Mulino the perfect opportunity to pin the blame on the man heading the government investigating him says La Prensa.

“The agreement was negotiated by the Foreign Ministry of Varela, from country to country,” Mulino claimed in mid-2015.

Mulino also claimed a memorandum of understanding between Italy and Panama “obliged him” to sign contracts with Finmeccanica, although the language of the contract contained no such language. Prosecutors have said that the memorandum was never a binding document.

W hat is clear is that Mulino brought the contracts before the Cabinet Council for approval, and then signed them himself. This would seem to indicate that it was Mulino who convinced the council to approve them, and not the other way around, as he would later claim.

The Public Prosecutor is investigating  one of the modalities of embezzlement established in the Penal Code, one that establishes the responsibility of officials for allowing the misuse of public funds and assets whose administration was entrusted to him.

Before being in custody, Mulino has justified the purchase of radars in television interviews, explanatory notes to La Prensa  and public letters, explaining that it was a surveillance system to combat drug trafficking, although the company providing the radars had no prior experience in that area.