COSTA RICA NEWS — The news keeps turning up that the Citizen Action Party (PAC), may have overpaid repeatedly due to errors made by one of its own officers, lawyer Jorge Sibaja. La Nacion reported Wednesday that Sibaja billed his party for 2 million colones for paperwork the Supreme Elections Tribunal didn’t require.
Moreover, even then, says the paper, the cost of the paperwork should have been merely 5000 colones. The charge was for the authentication separately for registering 395 voting booths. For each application, Sibaja charged the party 5,000 colones to authenticate the signature of then-party general secretary Olga Marta Sanches, as opposed to signing one registration for all 395 booths.
The documents were issued after the Feb. 2 election as part of the Elections Tribunal (TSE) in the 11 days between Feb. 5 and 16. On just Feb. 14, the paper reported that Sanchez signed 197 of the unnecessary papers.
These documents are part of the 325 million colones that Sibaja had to return to the party after a previously revealed case where audtors found the party paying for Sibaja’s authentication that were in no way needed. (See previous article.)
The party wound up paying Sibaja 117 million and the rest he “donated” to the party. The party (known as PAC) nearly submitted a bill for both the 117 million and the 325 million to the TSE for reimbursement as legitimate campaign expenses to be reimbursed with public funds.
Fortunately, the bill was withdrawn at the last moment but the inflated amount probably would have been caught by a TSE audit, much to the embarrassment of a party that makes clean politics its trademark. A number of such fraudulent charges were presented after the 2010 election by several parties.
TSE Electoral Registry director Hector Fernandez told La Nacion that he was floored when TSE presented its fist full of 395 documents, including the log book for each voting table. He had never seen this before and was expecting to be handed a single sheet of paper.
It appears that lawyer Sibaja did not do his homework, or did it too well.
Article by iNews.co.cr, reposted with permission
