Rafael Garay prepares for his move to avoid 7 years in prison | National

Santiago's second criminal court sentenced Rafael Garay to seven years' imprisonment for committing fraud against 29 people for a total of nearly 1,300 million pesos.

But the engineer's lawyer, Daniel Celis, announced that he would make an appeal for annulment in order to overturn the verdict that had sentenced him to jail on Thursday .

The defender will notably rely on the judge did not consider the victims' mitigation as a remedy, to which he had made close to one million pesos and that his sentence was higher than that inflicted in other cases of pyramid fraud.

"It's an incredibly disproportionate sentence compared to the facts that have come up during the trial – logically, it's for a media issue," he accused.

. between the surveys that have marked public opinion. In the AC Inversions case, the owner and CEO of the company, Patricio Santos, was sentenced to five years in prison by an agreement between the Office of the Prosecutor and the defense. In this survey, 3,500 people were scammed for a total amount of more than 100,000,000,000 pesos.

For her part, the co-founder of the Arcano group and mother of Alberto Chang, Verónica Rajii, was sentenced after the end of a four-year trial. probation for having cheated more than 1,000 people for 97,000 million pesos.

In the IM Forex case, the brothers Víctor and Ivonne Pantoja were also the subject of an abbreviated trial and were sentenced to intensive probation. They cheated 1,200 people for 40 billion pesos.

"A sentence to its measure"

The truth is that the seven years of sentence are greater than those requested by the public prosecutor, who asked for only six. However, the court found that this sentence was not in accordance with the sanction of just measurement, given the antecedents exposed at the oral trial.

In its operative part, the courts considered two mitigating factors in favor of the engineer: the previous irreproachable behavior and the Collaboration in the investigation.

After the result, Metropolitan District Attorney North Morales was satisfied with the sentence. "The facts presented to the court were proven and the court also found that the seriousness of the events justified a custodial sentence, which is important to us."

"It is in the power of the court to impose a penalty." The prosecution asked for six years, but the court found that it was seven years, which seems reasonable and in the context of what the court considered the facts, "he said.

In addition, the 15 civil suits brought by the victims were admitted, forcing Garay to return the amount defrauded. However, the parties agreed that the engineer did not have the property for that.

"I would not dare to describe it as historical, because failures have imposed similar sanctions, but within the bounds of the regularity of the sanctions imposed.I think it is a sentence in accordance with the law," said the plaintiff's attorney and former prosecutor, Sabas Chahuán.

Why was he sentenced to a heavier sentence?

The doctor In criminal law, Marcelo Hadwa explained that the sentence imposed responds to this "although the crime of fraud provided for in our penal code does not provide for a particularly severe penalty, the court considered that, in this case, she had been committed several times – had committed twenty-nine fraud crimes, for which reason the rule set forth in Article 351 of the Code of Criminal Procedure could be applied with regard to increasing the sentence of One or two degrees when the subject is sanctioned for the commission of two or more crimes of the same kind.In other words, they protect the same legal rights. "

In this scenario," although the increase of a degree of punishment is mandatory for the court, the increase in two grades is a faculty left to your discretion, which was applied in the case of Garay, "he added.

At the same time, he remarked that "the court did not accept the thesis – very much used by the defense – that in this case we are confronted with a single crime or a crime of continuing nature and not in the face of twenty-nine years of fraud, according to the estimates of the judgment ".

In the same resolution, the resolution "also took into account the fact that the stolen money had not been recovered, in addition to the action of Rafael Garay when he was lying at the about his illness, his flight from the country, and that some of the defrauded sums were the only means of income of the persons concerned. "