Santo Domingo, RD.
Marcelo Hofke, who will appear as a witness before the court judging the Odebrecht case, has no capacity to prove the agreement between the Brazilian construction company and the Dominican Public Prosecutor’s Office, as his signature is not in this document.
The approach is supported by the technical defenses of the defendants in the process, which is known to the First Collegiate Court of the National District, which detract from the value of the contributions that Hofke can make.
They stated that in 2017 – under interrogation from the Public Prosecutor’s Office – Hofke stated that one of the defendants in the case, Àngel Rondón Rijo, was Odebrecht’s commercial representative in the country and not a person who served as an intermediary to distribute bribes.
“We have no knowledge of the payment of a bribe, nor of the name of who would be the person who served as an intermediary to the fingers until … what we recognize is that we have a sales representative hired in the Dominican Republic, the who has exercised our representation through his companies, who is Mr. Àngel Rondón Rijo. “
This was stated by Hofke in the interrogation of January 10, 2017 at 11:30 am, signed by the then prosecutor Jean Alain Rodríguez and Laura Guerrero Pelletier, at that time director of the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office for the Prosecution of Administrative Corruption ( Pepca).
The document, which records Hofke’s assertion that “payments were made for services rendered during the period from 2001 to date,” is also signed by attorneys Robert Valdez, Maria Eugenia Batista and the declarant himself.
Nevertheless, the Public Prosecutor’s Office calls Hofke a key witness in the trial and documents the following about him: “The statements of this witness will prove in court his intervention in the Odebrecht agreement with the Dominican Public Prosecutor’s Office, as well. like any other circumstance that is useful for clarifying the facts. “