Spanish
Santo Domingo. - The deputy, Tobias Crespo, criticized this Friday the use of figures such as the rewarded denunciation, the abbreviated trial and the conditional suspension of the process in cases of administrative corruption, considering that these mechanisms —although contemplated in the Penal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code— send the wrong message to society.
Crespo warned that, under the current scheme, "whoever steals a lot returns 3% or 5%, doesn't go to jail, denounces others and then reappears in another corruption scandal". He pointed out that it is frequently "the same names, the same businessmen and the same people" involved in similar cases.
Regarding the embezzlement case at the National Health Insurance (SeNaSa), the legislator stated that these procedural benefits should be reviewed and modified, so that even when the accused return part or all of what was stolen, they also face custodial sentences. In his opinion, only in this way will the repetition of these practices be avoided.
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In the knowledge of the measure of coercion requested as a result of the judicialization of Operation Cobra, three of the accused admitted before the judge that they paid bribes to Santiago Marcelo F. Hazim Albainy, former director of the National Health Insurance (SeNaSa), and other officials of that state entity. The Public Ministry has highlighted the strength of the case presented against the ten arrested in the framework of Operation Cobra for taking advantage of SeNaSa to defraud the Dominican State of billions of pesos and that only in bribes they received more than 2 billion pesos.
