Santo Domingo, RD.
Marcelo Hofke, who will appear as a witness before the court hearing the Odebrecht case, does not have the capacity to prove the agreement between the Brazilian construction company and the Dominican Public Prosecutor’s Office, as his signature does not appear on that document.
The approach is supported by the technical defense of the defendant in the trial, known to the first collegiate court of the national district, which decreases the contributions that Hofke can make.
They said that in 2017 – under the interrogation of the Public Ministry – Hofke stated that one of the accused in the case, Ángel Rondón Rijo, was an Odebrecht sales representative in the country and not a person who served as an intermediary to distribute bribes.
“We are not aware of the payment of a bribe or the name of the person who served as an intermediary for such purposes … what we recognize is that we have a sales representative employed in the Dominican Republic, who exercised our representation through their companies, who is Mr. Ángel Rondón Rijo. “
This is what Hofke said in the interrogation on January 10, 2017 at 11:30 in the morning, signed by the then lawyer Jean Alain Rodríguez and Laura Guerrero Pelletier, at that time director of the Office of the Special Prosecutor for the Prosecution of Administrative Corruption (Pepca).
The document, which records Hofke’s assertion that “payments were made for services rendered between 2001 and the present,” is also signed by lawyers Robert Valdez, María Eugenia Batista and himself a declarant.
Despite all this, the prosecution appoints Hofke as a key witness in the trial and documents the following about him: “With the statements of this witness, his intervention in the Odebrecht agreement with the Dominican public prosecutor, as well as any other circumstances, will be proved in court. this is useful for clarifying the facts. “