Almost 320 million pesos used by the State between August 2022 and December 2023 for the maintenance and use of the plane purchased by the previous management of the Rio Negro Government.
The item that required the most resources was fuelrequiring almost a third of the expenditures made in those 16 months.
The aircraft stopped flying on December 2 of last year, when the new provincial authorities decided to enter a diagnostic stage. The conclusion of that process, announced last week, was that The Cessna Citation V Ultra will be sold “for economic and operational reasons.”
The numbers that led to this definition appear in the document that the Executive submitted to the Legislature last Thursday, in response to a request for reports from the PRO legislator, Juan Martín.
There it was learned that the plane does not have authorization from the ANAC for medical flights, that former governor Arabela Carreras used it more times than was known, but the 20 different reasons for which expenses derived from the decision had to be faced were also detailed. to buy that aircraft, model 1994, for which 4.2 million dollars were paid.
This ranking is headed by the 100,140,402.48 pesos destined to “YPF Vuelo” and continue with the 85,045,825.08 pesos that were paid for the three maintenance instances provided for in the contract with the firm that sold the plane to the Government.
These installments were paid on September 16, 2022 and on March 23 and September 22, 2023, each of them being $121,250. Due to the devaluation of the Argentine peso, each obligation demanded higher amounts as time progressed.
The category “personal assets” It represented the third most important expenditure for Río Negro, with 54,402,688.73 pesos; followed by “medical costs medical flights”which consumed 41,723,313.02 pesos.
Fifth place on the scale of disbursements from the State went to the “insurance contracting”with 8,804,616 pesos.
On the sixth step appears “pneumatic safety and labor pilots”, an item that appears related to the incident that occurred in Salta, when the plane arrived from the United States. That episode, in which the covers of the Cessna were damaged, caused an expense of 8,226,742.92 pesos, which came out of the provincial Treasury, despite the official announcements of those days, guaranteeing that the plane’s supplier would take care of the consequences of the incident.
The acquisition of those tires It also forced a significant payment to be made: it was 6,294,540.15 pesos.
The next point includes the per diem, with 4,294,998.23 pesos.
The million-dollar sums of expenses included 2,838,146.50 pesos of “aircraft training and operational maintenance”; another 2,106,908.15 for “medical professionals and flight nurses” and 1,647,071.60 for “hiring of pilots”remembering that the Province had to look for that service in the private sector because the Government of that time decided to buy an airplane without having within its staff qualified professionals to meet the defined objectives.
The 319,024,322.44 global pesos spent are complemented by the imprecise item “other maintenance and operating expenses” for 888,006.07 pesos; acquisition tow bar (641,300 pesos); landing permits (577,080.06 pesos); rental of a container for equipment (465,012.12 pesos); communication equipment (365,000 pesos); aeronautical charts (202,200 pesos); annual tow tractor insurance (173,498.93 pesos); connection cables (98,832.30 pesos) and airworthiness letters (88,140 pesos).
