Mexico City. The Mexican Petroleum Institute (IMP) must carry out a new public version of the license contract for the use of surface electromagnetic inspection technology for pipelines, held on August 10, 2021, instructed the National Institute of Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data (Inai).
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Headquarters of the National Institute of Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data, in archive image. Photo Roberto Garcia Ortiz
The IMP must also report on the income obtained following the business trips made by its former director, Ernesto Ríos Patrón, and the director of Operation Planning, Patricia Agundis Salazar; as well as the breakdown of the travel expenses generated by said commissions, which include expenses for food, lodging and mobility.
When presenting the matter before the plenary session, Commissioner Francisco Javier Acuña Llamas explained that another public version of the contract must be made, which complies with the conditions established by law.
The Inai commissioner indicated that the required information “is regarding state-of-the-art technology, applied for a very delicate business, because it is a strategic activity of the State: the supply of fuels through the pipelines, which, in addition, everyone knows by the huachicolas it is popularly known, are constantly intervened to illegally extract fuel from them”.
Acuña Llamas specified that, although the information is of a sensitive nature, the Inai carefully analyzed the matter to ensure that only the portions determined by the Institute are tested, with the purpose of opening the information that it is possible to know regarding the aforementioned contract.
The person who requested the information filed an appeal for review with the Inai through which he expressed his disagreement with the response of the IMP, which delivered a public version of the required contract and only provided a table with the total amounts of the trips corresponding to the international commissions. .
In order to have more elements for the analysis of the appeal for review, the presentation by Acuña Llamas made a request for additional information to the obligated subject, through which the IMP highlighted that, once the companies with technologies that compete with it know the scope of the contract might develop barriers to entry, inhibit marketing, gain access to potential customers or improve their business conditions, a situation that would affect them.
In this regard, the presentation warned that the requested contract contains technical information that accounts for the research, technological development and innovation, distribution procedures and technical characteristics of the product; that as a whole accounts for the technology in charge of the IMP, which describes specific aspects for its implementation and operation, therefore, it is likely to be classified as confidential.
However, it determined that not all the information that was initially classified as restricted access has that character, such is the case of the acronym of the client’s name; the scope of the contract; the type of license; the considerations to avoid conflict with other companies to operate the contract, and the terms of validity, among other data.
At this point, the Inai commissioner pointed out that the IMP “delivered a practically unintelligible version, because it tested almost everything, it left one of those versions that is practically nothing more than complying, to deliver something, but the data protection of that version.”
Due to the foregoing, the plenary session of the Inai decided to modify the response of the IMP and instructed it to prepare and deliver a new public version of the license contract for the use of surface electromagnetic inspection technology for pipelines.
