Raid on Autopista Central: eight officials charged with fraud in TAG toll notices in La Granja
The Southern Metropolitan Prosecutor's Office raided the offices of Autopista Central in Las Condes. Eight officials from the Local Police Court in La Granja were charged with falsification and bribery.
Southern Prosecutor's Office raids Autopista Central over alleged fraud in TAG toll notice notifications
The Southern Metropolitan Prosecutor's Office executed a raid on Thursday on the central offices of Autopista Central, located in Las Condes, as part of an investigation into fraud linked to TAG tolls at the Local Police Court in La Granja, according to biobiochile.cl.
The operation was carried out jointly with personnel from the OS9 unit of Carabineros. The objective was to gather digital evidence related to the case.
Last week, eight officials from the same court were charged with the crimes of falsification of public documents and bribery. The Court of Appeals in San Miguel confirmed today the pre-trial detention of six of them; the two remaining defendants were placed under lesser precautionary measures.
Prosecutor Christian Toledo, from the Southern Prosecutor's Office, explained the core of the alleged fraud: the officials were assigned as receivers to carry out notifications, but the records indicated that the same person was in different communes in the Metropolitan Region at the same time.
"They said they were notifying a person in the commune of San Bernardo at 9 in the morning and they said they were in Colina also at the same time, which obviously was not possible," Toledo said.
The prosecutor detailed the economic incentive behind the scheme: for each notification carried out, the officials received additional compensation to their salary of around 30,000 pesos. In some cases they recorded 10, 20 or 30 notifications in a single day.
Toledo also stressed that many people affected by the fines never actually received the notifications, despite the records indicating otherwise. "That notification never reached the hands of the people who were being sued," he said.
The formalisation involves three aspects linked to falsification. The first concerns the creation of false case files that do not correspond to the court's intake register. The second points to the issuance of certificates through false official documents to request information from the Civil Registry. The third refers to fraudulent stamps on the notifications.
With regard to the bribery offence, the prosecutor explained that the officials obtained, through those false official documents, information to which they legally could not access without a properly processed case.
The facts attributed to the eight officials were recorded between 2019 and 2020. So far, there is no total assessment of the amount defrauded.
Source: Google News CL — Crime