The Peruvian Attorney General’s Office has opened a preliminary investigation against the Peruvian Minister of Culture, Betssy Chávez, for the alleged crimes of prohibited negotiations, prevarication and influence peddling.
As detailed by the Public Prosecutor’s Office in a statement, Chavez would have benefited close associates of the also congresswoman of Democratic Peru during her time as head of the Ministry of Labor, as reported by the radio station RPP.
The investigation has been opened after the broadcasting of a report during the weekend in which the program ‘Cuatro Poder’, of América Televisión, reports on alleged irregularities detected in the hiring of two relatives of Abel Sotelo Villa, a businessman who is sentimentally linked to the head of the Ministry of Culture.
For this reason, the State Attorney General, Patricia Benavides, has ordered the preliminary investigation to be carried out within 60 days.
After the opening of the case, the Minister of Culture has pronounced herself against the investigation, assuring that the denunciation made by the program Cuarto Poder does not mention «any objective element» that links her with an intervention «in some public contest or in an interference in an administrative process».
«It does not even mention any objective element that accredits that I have been interested in any contest, bidding or similar or that I have interfered in any way in a judicial or administrative process, so, without having the ‘investigation’ any legal support, I hope that it has the fate that corresponds to it,» said the head of the Ministry of Culture in a statement published by ‘Diario Correo’.
Likewise, the head of the Ministry of Culture has affirmed that she has not helped to benefit any of her close or distant relatives with hiring in the State.
«Likewise, all hires made in my congressional office have been duly filtered by the human resources offices of the Congress of the Republic and were framed within the law,» she added.
