More Of Gallardo's Strange Accounts: Where Did 22 Billion Pesos For San Luis Potosí Go?

"Sol Prendido" for Borderland Beat

Famous for the lack of transparency with which he has managed his government, accused of looting public funds through the diversion and triangulation of resources, which led him to spend eleven months in jail; accustomed to reserve information until the years following the end of his administration, the governor of San Luis Potosi, Ricardo Gallardo Carmona, of the Green Ecologist Party, has once again found himself in the eye of the hurricane.

The Federal Superior Audit Office, ASF, has detected irregularities for more than 22 billion pesos in the management of the 2022 Public Account.

Regarding this amount, received as Federal Participations, there is no evidence "of the accounting and budgetary registration of the expenditures financed with the resources received".

According to the Letter of Results sent last July by auditors Ignacio Merino and Diana Edith Cervantes Reyes, "the destination of the expenditure of 22, 148, 251, 096.00 pesos is unknown (...) in non-compliance with articles 42 and 79 sections I and III of the General Law of Governmental Accounting and 29 and 29th of the Fiscal Code of the Federation".

According to the Audit Order AEGF/4553/2023, it was not possible to determine the amount allocated to "Personal Services", "Materials and Supplies", "General Services", "Transfers, Allocations, Subsidies and Other Aid", as well as "Movable, Immovable and Intangible Goods".

The amount allocated to "Public Works", as well as "Acquisitions, Leases and Services" was not determined.

According to the Schedule, there is no information on the resources disbursed for the General Participation Fund, the Municipal Development Fund and the Taxation and Collection Fund, among others.

Just in August 2020, the then head of the UIF, Santiago Nieto Castillo, filed a complaint before the FGR through which he accused Governor Gallardo Carmona, as well as his father, Ricardo Gallardo Juarez, of carrying out an "elaborate scheme" through which more than 700 million of public resources were diverted, during the years they governed the towns of Soledad de Graciano Sanchez and San Luis Potosi (2009 to 2015), amount that, according to the file, was sent to various companies owned by the family.

Gallardo Carmona, known as El Pollo, had already been presented before the Seido in January 2015 on charges of organized crime and operations with resources of illicit origin. On that occasion, authorities claimed that he had diverted more than 200 million pesos from the City Hall accounts, which went to three companies in which he was a majority shareholder.

He was never declared innocent. But through a legal trick - a magistrate considered that the money found in his companies was not illicit, since it came from the City Hall - a collegiate court granted him an amparo sentence. He was released after spending almost a year in the Hermosillo and Ocampo prisons.

With a view to the 2021 elections, and having become an ally of President López Obrador, he was placed at the head of the preferences in the gubernatorial race. That same year, a report by the National Intelligence Center included him on a list of governors -- along with Ruben Mocha Moya of Sinaloa -- with ties to organized crime. Gallardo was linked to the Northeast Cartel.

Gallardo Carmona stated that he was never associated with organized crime: "The crimes for which I was prosecuted were for organized crime, which is not the same thing," he said.

A year ago, a document from the XII Military Zone, hacked from the Sedena, linked him to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, with which he allegedly made a pact to appease the violence between the criminal groups that plagued the state: among them, the Gulf Cartel and Los Alemanes.

The pact was broken by the murder of four members of the Gulf Cartel and finally Los Alemanes managed to impose themselves as the hegemonic organization.

The file opened by the FGR was frozen. It is said that in the early years of his government, it was not convenient for the president that the dirty laundry of his political ally be aired.

Three years later, however, Gallardo's accounts have failed him again. Nothing new. The custom has been around for three decades now.

Governor Ricardo Gallardo Cardona

El Universal