Hear
With a ruling of high political tension, Chamber I of the Federal Chamber of Criminal Cassation, with the votes of the judges Diego Barroetaveña, Carlos Mahiques and Daniel Petrone benefited the cousin of former president Mauricio Macri in the corruption case derived from the notes of Roberto Baratta’s driver, Oscar Centeno. The payments made by Angelo Calcaterra and his subordinate, Javier Sánchez Caballero, to former officials of the Ministry of Planning, They will be investigated as electoral contributions that were not declared – in the electoral justice system – and not as acts of active bribery.a criterion that had been corroborated in all previous instances.
This ruling opened the door for the other businessmen involved in the notebooks case to have a similar fate and for the former officials to claim that they received black money in bags as contributions.
Known as “Coconut”, Carlos Mahiques was Minister of Justice during a stretch of María Eugenia Vidal’s administration in the province of Buenos Aires. He then arrived for a transfer to the Federal Court of Cassation, the highest criminal court in the country below the Court. He had competed and assumed office in 2013 as judge of the Buenos Aires Court of Cassation, which, unlike the Federal Court of Cassation, deals with common crimes, such as robberies and homicides. As a federal criminal cassation chambermaid, she intervened in cases of high political significance such as the one investigating Mauricio Macri for alleged espionage on the relatives of the victims of the sinking of the ARA San Juan. He was removed from that case at the request of the victims’ relatives, who were plaintiffs in the case.
He was also one of the judges – along with Diego Barroetaveña – who signed the ruling that last January confirmed the acquittal of former SIDE head Hugo Anzorreguy for the cover-up of the attack against the AMIA, with a different criterion than that adopted last week by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights when it considered the Argentine State – and its intelligence organizations – for said cover-up.
He is one of the judges who participated in the controversial two-day trip to the mansion that the British businessman Joe Lewis He rode on the shores of Lake Escondido, near El Bolsón. That trip, in which other judges and former officials participated along with businessmen from Grupo Clarín, led to the opening of a judicial file to investigate whether the officials had engaged in criminal conduct by accepting the invitation to Lago Escondido. The judges’ trip became known in October 2022, but gained great political relevance in December of that year, when alleged chats were leaked in which the participants of the excursion to the South talked about the dissemination that their trip had had, about how publicly install another version of what happened and how to stop the progress of the criminal case that was finally annulled.
Carlos Mahiques is a father of a judicial family. His son, Juan Bautista, was a representative of the Executive Branch in the Judicial Council during the Cambiemos government and is now the head of the Buenos Aires prosecutors. His other son, Ignacio, was a federal prosecutor and was sworn in in 2022 as a judge of the Court of Criminal, Juvenile, Misdemeanor and Misdemeanor Appeals of the City of Buenos Aires.
Barroetaveña spent his entire career in the Judiciary. First, in the San Isidro court, where he was an official defender and then a guarantee judge. As such, he was in charge of the case for the murder of María Marta García Belsunce. In that case he had strong differences with the prosecutor Diego Molina Pico. Barroetaveña did not advance as the prosecutor intended against Carlos Carrascosa, García Belsunce’s widower who was imprisoned and prosecuted as an alleged co-author of the murder. Barroetaveña was questioned by Molina Pico and accused of having refused to comply with a court ruling that had ordered Carrascosa’s arrest.
Barroetaveña was a judge in San Isidro from 1998 to 2005, when he became a judge of the Oral Criminal Court 21. In that court he participated in the trial for the crime of Mariano Ferreyra. He was one of the judges who sentenced the railway unionist Jose Pedraza to 15 years in prison, as a necessary participant in the homicide. Ferreyra was murdered when he participated in a protest that tried to cut off the Roca train tracks with outsourced workers from the railway cooperatives, who were attacked by a gang from the Railway Union.
After his time at TOC 21 and before reaching the Cassation, Barroetaveña served in a federal oral court in San Martín, where he judged cases of It hurts humanity. He is a member of the Association of Magistrates, of which he was treasurer, and is a leader of the Bordó list. Since November 2022, due to the ruling of the Supreme Court that modified its composition, Barroetavena integrate the Judicial Council representing the judges.
Petrone always sought to captivate the low profile. Both at an academic level and in her judicial function, she appeared in about 20 contests: in several shortlists she came first. The son of two Italian immigrants, he is the fourth of six siblings. His judicial career began in 1991 as a member of the Carlos Gerome investigative court. He was sworn in as a Cassation judge in 2018, along with his colleagues Barroetaveña and Guillermo Yacobucci. Before, he was an investigative judge in the economic criminal jurisdiction, where he was involved in a case of great political sensitivity: that of Antonini Wilson’s suitcase, in which he ruled that the former head of the Road Concessions Control Body (Occovi) had no merit. ), baptized as “parallel ambassador in Venezuela”, Claudio Uberti. Petrone also served as judge of the Federal Oral Court No. 2 of San Martín.
With a judicial career, he has been a member of the Association of Magistrates and Officials of the National Justice for 20 years and within that group he was one of the founders of the Bordó list, which is usually critical of the measures adopted by Kirchnerism at the institutional level. He also chaired the Center for Justice Studies of the Americas (JSCA), of the Organization of American States (OAS).
At the beginning of his career, in parallel to his work in the courts, Petrone spent five years as director of research on prisons and the penitentiary system at Unidos por la Justicia, a think tank that the businessman guided Francisco de Narváez when he became involved in politics in 2009.
In the Chamber of Cassation, Petrone usually fails in harmony with his colleague Barroetaveña. In December 2020, the two voted to validate the statements of those repentant in the case of the bribery notebooks. That ruling strengthened the accusation of the mega case for corruption, which was now weakened by the decision of Petrone and his two colleagues that the businessmen who confessed payments to former Kirchnerist officials should not respond in a criminal trial for those events but in electoral justice. .
Among other cases of political significance in which Petrone spoke is the case Oil Fuelsin which he voted to confirm the acquittal of the businessmen Christopher Lopez and Fabian De Sousa. That ruling, which left businessmen out of State fraud maneuvers but which condemned the former head of the Afip Ricardo Echegaray, It was overturned by the Supreme Court last month. The Court said that the case must return to the Chamber of Cassation where other different judges, who have not given their opinion, must issue a new ruling, taking into account that the Court said that the court had only apparently dealt with the proposals of prosecutor Villar against the acquittals.
THE NATION
