"Heart of the island."
This is how Tolhuin
is known
, whose almost 7 thousand inhabitants live on the eastern shore of Lake Fagnano, in the center of Tierra del Fuego.
Paradise of lenga and peat, now the municipality has jumped into the media for a much more mundane reason.
It is a scandal in which two local councilors were involved who
were made to pay for "rearranging the wardrobe"
, shopping and paying for barbecues and hamburgers.
This was stated in an audit that evaluated the expenses of the 2015-2019 legislative period in the Tolhuin Deliberative Council.
The revelations broke out a gigantic scandal in this small city, which had just emerged from the latest controversy: last December, the councilors set their salaries at 2,200,000 pesos.
Although the audit was carried out over two legislative periods ago, two members of the current Council staff were under scrutiny.
They are
Matías Rodríguez Ojeda
, president of the institution, and
Marcelo Muñoz Fernández
, who were re-elected by different sectors of Peronism (Justicialist Party and Sol de Mayo, respectively).
Matías Rodríguez Ojeda, the president of the Deliberative Council of Tohuin, in Tierra del Fuego.
Instagram Photo
According to the audit, Rodríguez had them advance the
payment of "three months of representation expenses" to "readjust his personal wardrobe"
and "for management reasons due to having been elected president of the Council" in 2019.
For his part, Muñoz requested an advance payment of six months of representation expenses in order to move with his family to Buenos Aires "for health reasons", but without providing any other information or documentation to support this supposed need.
In the case of Muñoz, the audit detected personal expenses paid with public funds from the Council in
butcher shops, stores and kiosks
, as well as gastronomic consumption outside the town.
For example, the councilor
paid expenses for "two barbecues in the city of Río Grande"
and included tickets for dinners at a shopping center in the city of Ushuaia, specifically "at the Mostaza store and the rest at Lomitos Beto's," the report indicates. It leaked to the press.
Marcelo Muñoz, one of the Tolhuin councilors under controversy for his reporting of expenses.
Now, circumstances are playing out so that the Tolhuin Deliberative Council
can contain the scandal.
The new period of ordinary sessions will be inaugurated this Friday, March 1, with the particularity that the event in which Mayor Daniel Harrington will deliver his speech will take place
at the same time as the opening of sessions of the provincial Legislature,
where he will speak Governor Gustavo Melella.
For Muñoz Fernández it is also a particular date.
On March 1, 2023, he had to attend the beginning of the oral trial against him, after having been reported by Arturo Juárez for "injuries" in the parking lot of a supermarket in Río Grande in 2019. Coinciding with the opening of Council sessions , his lawyer presented a note, after which the conflict went to mediation between the parties.
The scandal over salaries of more than 2 million pesos
The Deliberative Council of the Fuegian Mediterranean commune made headlines in January when councilor María Florencia Auat, from Forja, the party that responds to Governor Gustavo Melella, revealed that the other councilors had set salaries higher, even than the last amount reported by the former president Alberto Fernández.
Councilor Florencia Auat denounced that her peers from Tolhuin increased their salaries in Tierra del Fuego.
The decision to increase the allowances was voted on in the last session of last year, held on December 23, and had an impact on the income of the current councilors, since four of them were re-elected in office and resumed their duties as of the 12th. December 2023.
The councilors who voted for the increase at the end of 2023 and collect it in this new administration are Jeanette Alderete and Rosana Taberna, in addition to Muñoz and Rodríguez, the same ones involved in the audit report that has now emerged.
When the complaint became known, the local branch of the State Workers Association (ATE) demanded the "immediate repeal" of the increase, but the request was not taken into account by the authorities.
With information from Télam