The Salvador Allende Foundation settled a property’s debt with Serviu by “bartering” 93 works of art. The works were never delivered to Serviu, and the Comptroller’s Office detected irregularities, although it declared the case statute-barred. Today, seven years later it has revived.
The mansion was sold to the Allende foundation by the government in 2003. Its value of around USD $1M at the time was supposed to have been paid off in annual installments, but the foundation stopped paying in 2007.
In 2015, under Socialist Bachelet’s government, the Allende family’s prestige would have made the usual forms of debt recovery politically unthinkable, so an alternative was found; the cession of 93 paintings (with an alleged informal value of USD $800,000).
That was a pretty irregular transaction on its own, but it now turns out that the Allende Foundation kept the paintings; they were never transferred to the government. Like the failed purchase of the Allende residence in Guardia Vieja, these so-called socialists wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
Hopefully a change of government will curtail the activities of these Foundations whose only aim is self-perpetuation and enrichment by leaching from the state.