The former Mayor of Huixquilucan, current local deputy, and PAN candidate for the Senate, Enrique Vargas del Villar, is under investigation for receiving over 140.5k dollars in “kickbacks” for awarding 12 waste collection contracts.
Vargas received the money through a triangulation scheme in which a company and an individual benefiting from the contracts transferred part of the obtained funds to another company, which in turn paid the PAN candidate.
The “kickback” also involved Pablo Fernández de Cevallos González, former Secretary of the City Council, who received 1.9 million pesos (around 102,703 dollars), and Julio César Zepeda Montoya, Director General of Public and Urban Services, who obtained 2.3 million pesos (about 124,324 dollars).
According to various documents that are part of the administrative investigation, during Vargas’s administration (2016-2021) and that of his wife, Romina Contreras (from 2022 to the present), the Huixquilucan City Council signed 12 contracts worth a total of 193 million pesos (about 10,432,432 dollars) with Grupo Contadero and Pablo Granada Tinajero for waste collection in the municipality.
From the money received by Grupo Contadero and Granada Tinajero, 8.816 million pesos (around 476,541 dollars) were transferred to Productions JEF, a company that then distributed 7 million pesos ( around 378,378 dollars) between Vargas and his two collaborators.
The funds received by Productions JEF in 2021 and 2022 came exclusively from the two municipal suppliers. During that same period, Vargas and his subordinates were the recipients of nearly 90% of the amounts received by the company.
Productions JEF was created in 2005 by José Luis Exiga Falcón, Vargas’s personal accountant, and since 2021, it has been used for the triangulation of funds.
Fernández de Cevallos González is the technical secretary of the PAN Parliamentary Group in the State of Mexico Congress, which Vargas presides over, and he has also served as the sole administrator of JEF since April 2021.
Zepeda continues to work under Romina Contreras in Huixquilucan and was responsible for signing at least nine of the 12 contracts awarded to the contractors.
Vargas himself acknowledged in his asset declarations that he received payments from Productions JEF in 2021 and 2022. The income was declared under industrial, commercial, and/or business activity (after taxes).
However, the document does not mention that the company received money from beneficiaries of municipal contracts in Huixquilucan.
Of the 12 contracts signed by the City Council, eight were awarded directly; two were granted through a simulated bidding process in which only one bidder, Granada Tinajero, participated; and the remaining two were awarded through a bidding process where the only participants were Grupo Contadero and Granada Tinajero.
You can read the full report here: