2024-01-26 20:15:02
June 13, 2012 was a hectic day in the office of the Tax Court Department of the Internal Revenue Service (SII) of Valparaíso. On that day, a confused agricultural businessman arrived at the service offices, located on Melgarejo Street in the port city. His name was Luis Arancibia Cádiz and, according to what he said, he wanted to denounce a “network of corruption” within the organization.
Immediately, the then director of the department, María Thomas Gana, received Arancibia, who told her that he “felt cornered.” His case had begun with a series of settlements in which the SII was charging him nearly $240 million in taxes for investments made in mutual funds in which he was unable to prove the origin of the money.
Deciding to appeal, in December 2010 Arancibia had gone to the SII offices in Valparaíso. “I went to ask regarding the procedure to claim the settlements carried out and I approached the official, Mr. Osvaldo Villalobos Castro, to ask him regarding it,” the man declared in the summary prepared by the SII, which La Tercera accessed. What was irregular, according to the complainant, was that Villalobos “referred him to a woman who turned out to be his spouse.”
Expelled from the SII for corruption: the untold story of Leonarda Villalobos’s father
Osvaldo Villalobos -who died in 2015-, who had worked since 1972 as an administrator of the SII in Valparaíso, and his wife, the accountant Luz Mutter Urbina (67), are the parents of the lawyer and tax advisor María Leonarda Villalobos, who is today being investigated by the Prosecutor’s Office following the broadcast of the audio of a meeting that she herself recorded, in which, together with the lawyer Luis Hermosilla and the businessman Daniel Sauer, they talk regarding the Factop false invoice scheme and alleged bribes to officials of the SII and the Commission for the Financial Market (CMF).
“We were getting to know each other and I found out that he charged me super cheap. My money… was 3,500 dollars, with my house seized and service transfer done. And I paid zero for the service. And I paid Leo 140 pieces. I mean, and for the rest I think she has already prescribed (laughs). It was a complete success,” Daniel Sauer is heard saying in the audio regarding the tax procedures carried out by the lawyer. A job that, in light of her background, Leonarda Villalobos would have “inherited” from her parents.
In the SII summary of Luis Arancibia’s complaint once morest Osvaldo Villalobos, the agricultural businessman detailed that, following the recommendation of the SII official, he met with his wife, Luz Mutter Urbina. “She took me to Arturo Prat Street, where the accountant Mr. Germán Soto Vilches has her office, who, according to her, was an eminence in Tax Law.” But it wasn’t just that. Soto Vilches was also a former SII employee who, for almost 20 years, was a colleague of Villalobos and a close friend of the Villalobos Mutter couple.
Expelled from the SII for corruption: the untold story of Leonarda Villalobos’s father
After not finding the accountant, Luz Mutter revealed the scheme. “He explained to me that they charged a percentage of everything that was reduced through taxes and that, if I wanted to be attended to without being out of time, I had to pay the sum of $ 1 million, in addition to leaving $ 10 million in guarantee of payment of the total fees,” Arancibia told the SII. An offer that would later only bring problems for everyone involved.
On December 24, 2010, the day following meeting with Luz Mutter, Luis Arancibia received a call from the accountant. “He told me that Osvaldo Villalobos wanted to talk to me at the service,” the businessman said in the SII summary. “I went that same day in the morning to talk to this person, who asked me if he was bringing the money,” Arancibia said.
Surprised by the directness of the public official’s request, the fruit exporter would have answered him verbatim: “How can it occur to you that I am going to give you that money here in cash, that does not correspond.” To which Osvaldo Villalobos, according to the SII summary, would have responded: “Just pass it on, hand it over, it doesn’t matter.” After the exchange of words, Arancibia claimed to have told him “that he was crazy because of what he asked of me and I left the office.”
But only minutes passed and Luz Mutter returned to the fray. “We met in my vehicle, because I was leaving and there he convinced me that this was the procedure for tax work, that the money was for Germán Soto, who is in charge of the collection that way (sic),” Arancibia declared before the SII prosecutor.
In this way, Mutter would become a kind of intermediary between the businessman and the tax specialist who would write the documents to appeal to the SII, in a scheme similar to the one that his daughter, Leonarda Villalobos, claims to have had between the owners of Factop and the lawyer Adrián Fuentes Campos, former legal advisor to the Civil Registry, who would have provided paid services to correct writings that would later be presented to the service.
Finally, Luz Mutter convinced Luis Arancibia to make the payments. Although the businessman took a precaution that would later allow him to verify part of his complaint. “I did it by issuing a check for the sum of $1 million in the name of Luz Elena Mutter, because I did not want to leave her the money in cash to prove that she had paid her. They made me sign a power of attorney and, in addition, required me to leave a check as collateral for $10 million, also in the name of Mrs. Mutter,” which would be cashed at the end of the case.
A year and a half later, on June 12, 2012, following his appeal was rejected, the businessman came to denounce the alleged corruption network with a copy of one of the checks in his hands. “On that occasion I was able to verify that the copy of the check was stamped with proof that the document had been cashed, precisely by the spouse of the already named official,” Erica Morales, then regional director of the SII of Valparaíso, reported in alarm to her superiors.
Expelled from the SII for corruption: the untold story of Leonarda Villalobos’s father
Along with this, Arancibia also sent a copy of an email she received from Mutter on January 29, 2011, in which the woman urgently asked to remove her name from the second check delivered as collateral. “You left me a tremendous problem and the only one who has to solve it is you. I am indebted at this moment to the mutual friend that my husband and I have had for many years and we have never had any problem, much less of an economic nature,” claimed the accountant.
Arancibia’s complaint had some immediate repercussions. According to the SII summary, early the next day, June 13, 2012, Luz Mutter appeared at the service offices in Valparaíso, where her husband worked. There she spoke with the official in charge of the agricultural businessman’s case, “asking her to accept the appeal that would be presented on behalf of the taxpayer.” To which she was told that “that was not the way to process any case.”
“She expressed that she was very worried, because the taxpayer was very crazy and had received from him a check for the sum of $1 million that she had personally collected for the contact she had made between the taxpayer and the accountant Mr. Germán Soto ”said an official who treated Luz Mutter that day.
Two days later, on June 15, 2012, a new episode would be added to the case. It was 1:15 p.m. and on the second floor of the Esmeralda Building, where the Tax Court Department of the SII of Valparaíso was located, a meeting began between Erica Morales, regional director of the service; María Thomas, head of said department, and Paulina Hurtado, head of the Legal Department. The reason? Analyze, with the original file and its copy in hand, the controversial case of Luis Arancibia.
The meeting, as the prosecutor in the summary was able to establish, lasted until 1:55 p.m. After that, María Thomas left the file folders on her desk and went to lunch without closing the door to her office. When she returned, around 3 p.m., both the original file and its copy were no longer there. There she began a frantic search that yielded no results. Mysteriously, and in the midst of the corruption complaint, the documents had disappeared.
After the corresponding complaints, which included a letter to the Public Ministry of Valparaíso, a long round of interrogations of all department officials began. “Margarita Venegas told me that she had seen Mrs. Carla Saldaña enter my office around 2:15 p.m. In addition, I requested the video records of the building where the regional directorate operates and in them the entrances and exits of said official’s building can be seen,” declared María Thomas herself.
Saldaña, who worked as an administrator at the place, when confronted with the testimonies and the camera images that showed her handing a folder to a man inside a car outside the service, gave a curious version: she assured that it was regarding a school project that his daughter had forgotten. At the same time, she denied having any relationship with the businessman Arancibia or with the payments made to the wife of her colleague Osvaldo Villalobos.
Weeks later, Saldaña changed her version. “My daughter, in reality, deceived me when she told me that she had to hand in a project at her school (…) What that folder contained were works and tests from previous periods that would be used as material to recycle,” she said. in a new interrogation. And, although she had initially agreed to hand over her phone traffic, she later said that she had lost her cell phone.
Despite all the inconveniences, the file might be reconstructed and the tax case continued until all taxes owed were paid. But neither the summary investigation of the SII, nor the criminal investigation, which ended with a conditional suspension of the procedure, managed to link the disappearance of the file with any action in favor of Luis Arancibia, nor with the checks that Osvaldo Villalobos’ wife received.
Villalobos, who was interrogated in the process, denied having recommended his wife to advise the businessman. Regarding the checks received by his spouse, he stated that “I don’t know what my wife does, she is an accountant, but she does not do paperwork or contacts.” However, one detail destroyed his alibi in the investigation.
According to the summary, “Mr. Villalobos made two queries in the Integrated Taxpayer Information System (SIIC), item Arc and Behavior, on January 26, 2011, at 2:53:51 p.m. and at 2:54:12 p.m. , respectively”, in which he reviewed data from Luis Arancibia “without there being any reason linked to his work to carry them out.”
Expelled from the SII for corruption: the untold story of Leonarda Villalobos’s father
Finally, in May 2014, both Osvaldo Villalobos and Carla Saldaña were dismissed from the SII under the charge of “failures to administrative probity.” By that date, Villalobos had already retired and a few months later he died from cancer, which triggered a series of disputes between his widow and his daughter, Leonarda Villalobos. Neither Carla Saldaña nor Luz Mutter responded to the messages to find out their version of the events.
Today, Germán Soto Vilches, the accountant who ended up advising the businessman Arancibia thanks to the intermediation of Villalobos and his wife, remembers the former SII official. “We were colleagues, very friends. We even had a birthday on the same day. We were actually a duo, we did evil things together,” he says into the phone.
Although he says that he no longer remembers if the tax advice came through Villalobos, he does claim to remember the profile of his friend Osvaldo. “Many times he was at the oven door. Many times they wanted to cut it off due to poor management. He was always on the edge of what was legal, as they call it now, ‘administrative honesty,’” he says.
And in greater detail, he does not keep anything regarding his friend’s practices: “Provide reserved material, charge for doing some management. Osvaldo did those kinds of things and that was vox populi. Similar to Hermosilla and Quintanilla, trying to obtain benefits from taxpayers, and that is prohibited. But I don’t work like that,” he concludes.
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