SANTO DOMINGO. – Overpricing as high as 1,200% were detected in the Monte Grande Dam construction contract and repairs on the Sabana Yegua hydroelectric, said a Bidding Committee report which probed denunciation of irregularities in the projects.

The latest information is part of a major scandal involving Hector Rodriguez Pimentel, one of president Leonel Fernandez’s key political allies for the May 16 elections, which aims to attract voters of the opposition PRSC party, of the Social Christian ideology.

The document made public on Monday in the Alicia Ortega news program found a series of distorted prices in disbursements, but was still signed last year by Rodriguez Pimentel, then director of the Hydraulic Resources Institute (INDRHI), the agency which manages the country’s dams.

The Committee found specific cases such as excavations for spigots of 0.69 meters, whose market cost doesn’t exceed US$1,000, but US$3,000.35 was paid in the contract, in which polyurethane foam insulation, whose unit costs is RD$2,000 in the market, is registered at RD$884,254.35.

The journalist Alicia Ortega learned that the company Productos Sinteticos del Caribe sells a six inch thick sheet of the insulator for between RD$18,000 to RD$20,000.

When the architect who works in a company which makes the material was asked “What would you think if I told you a sheet was quoted at 884,000 pesos?" Jose Berroa responded: “That’s impossible, not even the one used by NASA, which could cost as much as 40 or 50,000 pesos.”

And although the Bidding Committee which evaluated the project recommended not to assign the work until the prices were reviewed, Rodriguez Pimentel signed it on July 20 year last, 14 days after the report was issued.

The official, who declined comment on the allegation, is director of the Dominican Institute Agrarian (IAD).

Since October the General Controller’s Office investigates denunciations of overpricing  in the tender offers to design and build hydraulic infrastructures, on president Leonel Fernandez’s instructions, after Ethics Commission president Marino Vinicio Castillo warned of irregularities.

Castillo, interviewed by Ortega, noted that when the work was directly assigned the contractor, who reported a cost of US$15.0 million for the campsite and access road, although two months later reduced it to US$7.0 million. “That shouldn’t cost not even two million dollars, in fact that’s a case which is coming vitiated, very shadowy from the start.”

He also denounced that the incorporation of a study on Sabana Yegua dam, as part of the INDRHI and Andrade Gutiérrez contract, has “a blind price” of US$100 million, despite a US$43 million estimate a few years back, and which with the variations shouldn’t have exceed US$60 million.

The transaction is also investigated by the Government’s Anticorruption Agency, whose director, Hotoniel Bonilla, called INDRHI’s ex- director “pathologically corrupt.”

Overpricing denunciations in the INDRHI during Rodriguez Pimentel’s tenure aren’t new.

For example, in January last year Ortega revealed, among others irregularities, that the builder Constructora VHB was assigned the reconstruction of a major pump for the Nizao Canal, after the Tropical Storms Noel and Olga.

The work, initially contracted for RD$23.7 million, rose to RD$144 million, via a 120.6 million peso addendum six months later.