Federal Chamber May Reconsider Unusual Ruling That Justified Techint Bribes | Prosecutor Carlos Stornelli did not appeal, but the FIU and one of the defendants did.

The astonishing decision of the federal judge Julien Ercolini which justified illegal payments of Technical in question of the notebooks due to an alleged “state of necessity” of the company and dismissed its directors Paolo Rocca, Luis Betnaza and Héctor Zabaleta, can be examined by the Federal Chamber. Although the prosecutor Carlos stornelli The former Under-Secretary for Coordination of the Ministry of Planning Roberto Baratta did not appeal this decision, which the magistrate sued for gifts, and the Financial Information Unit (UIF), headed by Carlos Cruz, has deposited a membership. The anti-money laundering agency argued that the court cut the evidence to design a “forced argument” and “arbitrary” which would exempt entrepreneurs. He also pointed out that it is debatable that in a breach of these characteristics, where two parties necessarily intervene, one is dissociated and the other is held criminally responsible. The judge’s resolution stated that the donation was justified to preserve security and maintain work sources in a factory of the company in Venezuela.

Techint’s illegal payments, like those of many other companies, were in annotations attributed to ex-Planning driver Oscar Centeno, but its CEO and the executives involved managed to separately deal with evidence that could compromise them, to the point that their specific cases were not referred to oral proceedings along with the rest of the other 47 accused. The objective of this investigation and the statements at the time of businessmen who repented to regain freedom or, earlier, to escape from prison, were political and aimed – like many other causes promoted under the government of Mauricio Macri – to Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and its former officials. Stornelli’s lack of appeal in this section leaves it once again in evidence.

The situation of Techint’s men was ultimately in the hands of Judge Ercolini who, despite the fact that Betnaza and Zabaleta admitted to having paid gifts or bribes, concluded that “their actions would have had the sole and forced motivation to avoid serious damage to the liberty and integrity of people “who worked in Venezuela in one of the companies of the economic group to which they belonged and” by making the payment of the required sums of money, they saw the need urgently to affect a legal asset in order to save other legal assets (…), in this sense, the damage that could have caused the illegal payment of a large sum of money to a government public official would have been justified by the need to save money or avoid other damage whose occurrence was imminent ”.

In his declaration as a repentant, Zabaleta said he subscribed $ 1 million but he didn’t mention Venezuela. He said the problem was that if they didn’t pay, “they would cut off the electricity and gas from the house. Siderar and Siderca”. He said the threats concerned the production of tubes at the Campana plant. Betnaza raised the issue of the factory Pages in Venezuela in a confusing way. He said there was a standoff with the government of Hugo chavez for nationalization and that is why, for compensation, they asked for help from the Argentine government. He generically noted that he was concerned “for the people over there.” Rocca said he discovered the illegal payments through the media and it was he who introduced this way and in a statement that it may be linked to preventing job losses. This in the cause appeared in some writings, but it had nothing to do with the stories. Yet this is what the judge leaned on. At the same time, he considered that Baratta, who had denied the charges and suggested avenues for investigation, should be prosecuted.

The former planning official was the first to appeal and argued that it had not been explained why his lack of merit situation had changed and that the court itself had recognized that he had not had no interference in Venezuela-related affairs. The FIU adhered to Chamber I of the Chamber with a brief with questions to the judge and the indication that his sentence lacks logic. He does, he explains, “partial analysis of cut evidence on cars, at the same time as it avoids the production of new and relevant evidence, ignoring the timely exposure by the Federal Chamber in the sense of the need to deepen the investigation with new evidence and a pending production “.

“The text of the resolution also contradicts the rules of the due analytical method. Thus, we understand that first a forced argumentation was designed to resort to an a posteriori assembly of sections of evidence which could be fitted to the same, instead of analyzing all the evidence and deducing, in accordance with the law, the real factual picture. That is to say that one avoids deductive reasoning to replace it, in the resolution, by an inductive and arbitrary factual argument, which aims to exclude the liability of co-defendants on the basis of a convincing assembly in accordance with the imagined assertion, “the presentation makes it clear. This assembly, insists the UIF ”,it does not serve, in law, to support pronounced redundancies. ”

For the agency, appropriate testing measures were lacking and there is no evidence of a “state of necessity” which also links the alleged disbursements to Sidor’s situation. The FIU highlights an improbable aspect of the decision: “does not take into account the statements he attributes to Rocca in the sense that the latter, as a reference for the group, participated in the strategic discussions of Techint and Tecpetrol, with which could not ignore that an illegitimate payment was being made, whose traceability has not yet been analyzed. “Now we have to see if the Chamber admits to having dealt with this question.

Otherwise we will see, once again, that economic power, and especially that embodied by multinationals, is the great untouchable before the courts.