Lawmakers in the ruling PPK party yesterday joined their Apra colleagues in Congress to demand the resignation of the Comptroller General, Edgar Alarcon.
“The country needs a Comptroller General of the Republic who has the integrity and technical capability” to oversee public spending, said cabinet chief Fernando Zavala in a press conference on Wednesday.
“He should resign. He is totally unqualified for the job,” said jurist José Ugaz, president of Transparency International.
The call for Alarcon’s resignation follows allegations of irregular and illegal conduct, made on the Sunday TV program Cuarto Poder.
On Monday, the First Anticorruption Court opened an investigation into one of the allegations, the unusually high severance package Alarcon authorized in 2010 for a former secretary, and his attempt to dissuade his deputy comptroller from filing a report to Congress on the incident.
Alarcon, however, is also reported to have continued in a car sales business with his two sons when he was promoted to the position of deputy comptroller general (2013-2016), a job that expressly forbids any income-generating activities other than teaching.
“There is no way I’m going to resign,” Alarcon said, and blames the allegations on the government as a reprisal for his negative report on the contract addenda for the Chinchero Airport in Cusco.
Alarcon insists that he has never been involved in the car sales business, that he and his sons did buy 90 vehicles between 2003 and 2016 but that they were bought and imported on a one-by-one basis as second-hand cars for family use, and “then after a prudential period the cars were sold,” he told Radio Exitosa. He also argues that the seven cars he bought and sold in the past three years when he was deputy comptroller were for “family use.”
Some of the allegations made by his now deputy comptroller, Walter Grados, were reported to the Congress last year when Alarcon was a candidate for his current job, but despite heavy criticism he was chosen in June 2016 by President Humala’s outgoing administration and ratified by Congress.
Deputy Comptroller Grados presented his report to Congress again this year, with audio proof of Alarcon’s pressure to not file the complaint, but it has yet to be seen by Congress president Luz Salgado, who said this week that the complaint had been given to a sub-commission that had rejected it not because of the substance but because of the “form” it was presented.
Yeah right , he needed 93 cars how the hell big is his family.