New Evidence Surfaces in “Master Scam” Case
Rosario Robles, disgraced Secretary of Social Development in Mexico, taking questions from reporters at a 2015 press conference. (Creative Commons)
The Attorney General of Mexico announced late last week that the investigation into former Secretary of Social Development Rosario Robles revealed additional links to the Master Scam scandal that surrounded the government in 2017. Prosecutors now allege that the apartment Robles rented during her time as secretary was paid for by a company with connections to several other shell companies implicated in the corruption scandal. She has been under arrest and held in federal prison since August 2019.
Robles’s apartment, worth approximately $1 million, is located in a high-end shopping center and residential high rise in the heart of Mexico City. Escena, the company that allegedly paid her nearly $2,000 per month rent, is registered to the wife of Robles’s cousin. Both her cousin and her husband are now missing. The company’s office building also houses three more companies registered to Robles’s cousin. These three shell companies played a considerable role in the embezzlement scheme known as the Master Scam. The companies received millions of dollars worth of government contracts from the Department of Social Development under Robles. Later, auditors discovered the contracts were illegitimate.
Investigative journalists at Animal Politico and Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI) uncovered evidence of what they called the Master Scam in 2017 after reviewing federal budget statements. The scheme operated through three government agencies and eight public universities to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars into the hands of corrupt officials. The Ministry of Social Development, Mexico’s National Development Bank, and the state-owned oil company PEMEX gave a combined 186 contracts to universities, which then offered them to companies. The universities took millions in ‘commission’ for this work, while more than two-thirds of the companies they supposedly contracted did not even exist.
This new information against the disgraced minister comes on the heels of several other legal setbacks. The day before investigators announced this new evidence, one of Robles’s lawyers, Hernández Barros, left her defense after working to formulate a new legal strategy. He quit based on an agreement made with the secretary back in September 2019, just weeks after her arrest, when she claimed to have “run out of money” to pay her lawyers. Barros had agreed to stay on the case until she could find new, affordable representation.
On the same day, a judge denied Robles’s request to be released from prison for the remainder of her legal proceedings. Though Robles attempted to convince the judge of her commitment to remain in Mexico, he pointed to her expenditures—more than $60,000 on commercial flights in the last two years alone—as evidence of her economic capacity to flee the nation and thus denied her request. Robles has petitioned the court three times for release since her August 2019 arrest, citing health issues for her need to live at home. But judges are wary to free such a high-profile prisoner, as many similar suspected criminals (including others implicated by the Master Scam) have fled the country and evaded arrest.
These new allegations and proceedings against Robles play into the larger story about corruption in Mexico. The current president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, pledged during his campaign to pass sweeping accountability reforms, as the country has previously struggled with systematic government corruption. This emerging success in prosecuting the Master Scheme points to some advancements in this area. However, critics worry that he is inadvertently fostering new corruption as he dismantles oversight institutions, and some accuse him of co-opting anti-corruption efforts to weaken opponents and bolster his own power.