Mexico's top auditor slams oil firm Pemex over safety films

MEXICO CITY, Feb 18 (Reuters) - Mexico's top auditor has
told the government to investigate and punish employees at state
oil company Pemex for failing to properly record how many people
attended showings of telenovela-style safety films it spent
millions of dollars on.
Pemex, struggling financially with high debt costs and
flagging oil production, has come under scrutiny for mismanaging
and overspending on contracts for everything from oil platforms
to safety films.
The films, viewed by Reuters last year, included tales of
satanic sirens, time travel and divine interventions - all aimed
at one of the highest worker injury and fatality rates in the
industry.
Since 2009, Pemex paid a private company, Oaxaca-based
Cinetransformer, $44 million to produce at least 18 movies, all
less than an hour long, and show them to workers in the
company's mobile theaters.
But it is not clear who saw the films produced under the
most recent contract between Cinetransformer and Pemex,
according to a report by Mexico's Federal Audit Office published
on Wednesday.
The federal auditors said Pemex did not have attendance
records for all the showings that Cinetransformer was contracted
to provide between 2013 and the end of last year.
The auditors also found that the attendance records that
Pemex did provide were patchy. Many did not include the place or
date of the film showing, the names of the spectators were
handwritten and illegible, and there were many lines crossed
out, the audit said.
A spokesman for Pemex did not immediately comment.
Government regulators must take action against the Pemex
employees who were responsible for the patchy attendance
records, according to the audit.
The federal auditors also said Pemex may have to return 29.3
million pesos ($1.62 million) to the country's treasury, since
it failed to show employees attended all of those showings it
paid for, the auditor said.
An earlier Reuters investigation showed that many of the
auditor's recommendations go ignored, however.
Pemex last year defended its spending on the film contracts
to Reuters, saying that they were an important part of fostering
an overall culture of safety.
But Reuters also showed how Pemex's oil production business
has one of the worst accident rates among its peers, and that
the company dilutes its accident rate by including the hours
worked by office staff in its calculations of injuries per
employee-hours worked.
($1 = 18.0884 Mexican pesos)