Hear
The oral court that will carry out the trial of the case of “The notebooks of bribes” signed a very harsh and very unusual resolution last night: he accused three judges of the Federal Chamber of Cassationthe highest criminal court, for having removed the businessman from the bribery trial Angelo Calcaterra and having sent his case to the electoral justice system “without legal justification.”
Last night, the Court was informed of this decision. He sent a formal note to German Castelli, one of the judges of the oral court, to tell the ministers that in the case there was “extraneous functional interferences with the proper administration of justice”.
Calcaterra, construction businessman and cousin of the former president Mauricio Macri, managed to get the Cassation to take one of his proposals (which the oral court had said should not even be analyzed) and say that the alleged leftist payments that Calcaterra was discovered to have made to public officials did not have to be judged as bribes, but as “campaign contributions” that were not properly declared. The threat of punishment thus goes from prison to fine.
According to the judges of the Federal Oral Court 7 (TOF 7), the cassation chambers Diego Barroetaveña, Carlos Mahiques and Daniel Petrone They assigned themselves a jurisdiction that they did not have because only the Supreme Court could resolve the conflict of jurisdiction that promoted the businessman’s defense. They integrate the TOF 7 Enrique Méndez Signori, Fernando Canero and Castelli.
Méndez Signori and Canero stated that “the decision adopted thanks to the complaint deduced by the defense – in response to the denied appeal -, assigning jurisdiction to resolve the conflict of jurisdiction (…), lacks the corresponding legal justification”.
Castelli was even tougher than his colleagues: he voted to ask the Court to take up the case; That is, he took it immediately to reverse what the Cassation did. Méndez Signori and Canero did not agree to ask the Court for this because although they agreed that the Cassation exceeded its powers, they understood that the ruling that removed Calcaterra from the notebooks case is not final for now and that we must wait for it to be process appeals against that decision.
This Wednesday, the prosecutor Raúl Pleé He requested the annulment of the ruling of Barroetaveña, Mahiques and Petrone. And both he and the UIF, which is the plaintiff in the case, can now present an extraordinary appeal to reach the Supreme Court in that way to annul the transfer of the Calcaterra case to the electoral justice system.
Although Castelli was in the minority in his request for acvocation to the Court, last night he sent a note to the highest court “in order to send it a copy of what was resolved on that day by the Court.” [el TOF que Castelli integra]for the purposes of its knowledge and eventual effects, based on the explanations given in the penultimate paragraph of the vote of the undersigned, in the minority.
In that paragraph, Castelli maintained that “The particularities of the case are not limited to common judicial situations but to functional interferences foreign to the good administration of justice.”. He said that these particularities “have been the subject of express treatment” in the ruling in which he was in the minority, but that he understands that “they must be reported immediately and even as a minority to the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation in its capacity as supreme body and head of the Judiciary, for the purposes of its knowledge and possible effects, taking into account that the international responsibility of the Argentine State is at stake.
The questioned ruling was signed by the Cassation on Wednesday of last week. He accepted a request from Calcaterra for the investigation of the payments that he himself admitted in court to be investigated by the electoral judge. Maria Servini. She agreed with the defense’s position and demanded to keep the case. The federal prosecutor spoke in the same vein. Ramiro Gonzalez, which replaces the electoral prosecutor’s office. González was reported for this to the Attorney General’s Office by the prosecutor in the notebooks case, Fabiana Leonwho, like the prosecutor before the Pleé Cassation, said that it was not appropriate to remove Calcaterra from the oral trial in the case of the notebooks.
A central argument for ordering the change of jurisdiction was that the payments under investigation were made in election years (in 2013 and 2015). Calcaterra said he had been strongly pressured by Roberto Barattawho was an official at the Ministry of Federal Planning, to provide money for the campaigns.
The payments were made, according to the evidence gathered in the case, in the garage of the Hilton Hotel, at Macacha Güemes 307 in the city of Buenos Aires, on October 1, 2013, on June 30, 2015, on July 13 of 2015 and August 4, 2015. And in Manuela Sáenz 323, on September 11, 17, 18 and 25, 2013, on July 16, 2013, on August 1, 2013, on October 22, 2013, on May 28, 2015, August 18, 2015, September 14, 2015 and October 21, 2015. According to the defense, the 2013 payments were linked to the PASO of August 1, 2013 and with the general legislative elections of October 27 of that year. As for those of 2015, the argument is that they were related to the primaries of August 9 and the presidential general elections of October 25.
