Metropolitan GORE fraud: former analyst transferred $142 million to shell company without contract
The Metropolitan Regional Government filed a fraud complaint against the state against a former analyst and the owner of Fibronorte SpA after a payment of over $142 million without contractual support.
Fraud complaint against the state shakes the Metropolitan Regional Government
The Regional Government (GORE) of the Metropolitan region filed a fraud complaint against the state against a former analyst from its Treasury Unit and against the owner of an Antofagasta company that received more than $142 million without ever having maintained a contractual relationship with the service, according to biobiochile.cl based on the legal action accessed by its Investigations Unit.
The action was filed by governor Claudio Orrego before the Seventh Court of Guarantees of Santiago. The defendants are former analyst Maritza Pacheco Bartra, businessman Juan Pablo Vargas Miranda—sole shareholder of Fibronorte SpA—and the company itself, which the GORE seeks to hold liable as a legal person under the Economic Crimes Act.
The mechanism of fraud: registration, transfer and erasure of traces
According to the complaint, among Pacheco's usual functions was precisely creating suppliers in the institutional payment platform and preparing payrolls that were later sent to the bank for approval. On 29 January 2025, at 15:30 hours, she registered Fibronorte SpA in that platform for the first time, entering a Banco Santander account and an email with the fibron.cl domain which, as was later discovered, did not exist.
Using the same user, she generated an outflow of more than $142 million and included it in a payroll together with eight other payments to suppliers and beneficiaries of the service. At 17:07 hours on the same day she sent the payroll by email to the two GORE officials responsible for approving payments at the bank, with a copy to her supervisor, following internal protocol.
On 31 January the transfer to the Santander account was completed, which according to the complaint belongs to Fibronorte. The problem, as stated in the document, is that the company had nothing to claim: it was a company "with no contractual or commercial relationship whatsoever" with the Regional Government, with no purchase order, purchase order, agreement or project to justify the payment.
Once the payment was made, Pacheco returned to the Fibronorte file and, according to the GORE, modified all its details to hinder traceability: she replaced Banco Santander with BankBoston, changed the account number, changed the email to one with the tesoreria.cl domain and left the address as Bandera 46, the seat of the Regional Government itself. In addition, she deleted the transfer record from the platform, which could only be recovered through the service's internal backups.
The discovery and internal investigation
The manoeuvre came to light when Alfonso Vallejos, head of the Accounting Unit, was reviewing an accounting account for advances and found a payment to Fibronorte that no document supported. The GORE then opened a disciplinary procedure and filed a complaint with the Centro Norte Public Prosecutor's Office. Today the case is in the hands of the High Complexity Public Prosecutor's Office, and the complaint comes to complement it with the names of those responsible and the findings of the internal investigation.
For the service, a key element points to prior coordination between the defendants: "The defendant Pacheco Bartra already knew in advance its business name, its RUT and the exact number of its bank account at Banco Santander, information that did not appear in any record of this Service—the brief states—. The natural source of such information is the company itself or whoever controls it, which makes it possible to maintain the existence of a prior agreement between both defendants."
The businessman's version and the profile of Fibronorte
In conversation with Bío Bío's Investigations Unit, businessman Juan Pablo Vargas claimed that he lent his company's account as a favour to a third party: "An acquaintance told me he had a problem with the Tax Authority, that he couldn't use his account for a business. That transfer was made to my account, but I transferred that money to that person," said the defendant.
Fibronorte SpA was incorporated on 29 January 2024—exactly one year before Pacheco registered it as a GORE supplier—and has an office at Baquedano Street, in Antofagasta. It does not declare workers to the Internal Tax Service (SII). For the GORE, its profile is "entirely incompatible" with the legitimate receipt of a payment of that magnitude from a state body.
The complaint does not detail how the defendants knew each other, although there is a common point: Antofagasta. Vargas is from Antofagasta and his company operates in that city. According to records accessed by Bío Bío's Investigations Unit, Pacheco also married in that city and maintains an address there, despite working at the GORE headquarters in Santiago.
The service also rules out that Fibronorte received the money by mistake: "A payment of over one hundred and forty-two million pesos, coming from a public body with which there was no relationship whatsoever, could not go unnoticed by the sole shareholder and administrator" of the company, the brief states.
Source: Google News CL — Crime