they sued Roberto Baratta and fired businessmen

Federal judge Julián Ercolini, who is leading part of the investigation into the Cuadernos de las Bribes, sued the former undersecretary of the Federal Planning Coordination for the offense of gifts Roberto Baratta, a key man of former minister Julio de Vido, and sacked executives from Techint Group who had been investigated in this case.

The resolution, which was released on Tuesday, was signed by the magistrate who subrogates the court of Claudio Bonadio, the late judge who has promoted the case since its inception.

Ercolini believed that there was evidence that two Techint executives, Hector Zabaleta Yes Luis Betnaza, they gave him several payments requested by Baratta, some of which are recorded in the notebooks that the civil servant’s former driver wrote, Oscar Centeno, and it gave the cause a name. In these diaries, the driver noted all the journeys he made accompanying Baratta for years, in which the former civil servant of Julio De Vido during the management of Cristina Kirchner He went through various offices and private addresses to collect corruption money.

In the case of payments delivered by Zabaleta and Betnaza, the latter executive said in the case that had been requested by Baratta negotiate with the Venezuelan government to allow the repatriation in 2008 of the employees of the Sidor company, a Techint company which was expropriated by Hugo chavez.

Ercolini felt that he should sue Baratta for gifts for this episode because “the lack of responsibility in the events of the businessmen to whom the delivery of the money was attributed – which arose at the request of the official in a emergency situation, does not prevent the receipt of money by the public official involved, turning out to be a conduct which is subsumed directly under the criminal type analyzed ”.

“In the present case, it would be proved that the money deliveries were made to Roberto Baratta at the time he was working at the Ministry of Federal Planning, Public Investment and National Services, and that there is no evidence that this money was handed over for legal purposes. On the contrary, it would not have been shown that Baratta received this money to make, stop doing or delay, something related to its functions, given that he had no interference in the events that occurred with the company SIDOR in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, ”the judge said.

However, the judge considered that the executives of the group of companies who paid for these gifts were in a different situation from that of the official.

In this case, the judge stressed that “Betnaza and Zabaleta – each with the role they had in the committed incident – were expropriated from the SIDOR steelworks that he was in Venezuela, and that it was taken for granted that it was not they who threatened and frightened his dependents – a situation of danger created. In fact, the resolution of the conflict would not have been in their hands either. Indeed, we can observe that since this is a manifestly unmanageable situation for the company which was located in another State, it is even logical that the authorities of our country have resorted to requesting their intervention so that their compatriots can come back serenely. Hence the existence of the extremely serious and distressing evil which caused the imminence of a concrete danger which would have forced them to violate the law – by making an undue payment to a public official in response to a request for assistance ” .