The Ad Hoc intervening board that was installed a week ago in ICM Proyectos 2021, an allied company of the state-owned Petropiar, was annulled as of this Friday, according to judicial sources.
Such decision is contained in a sentence of the 3rd Special Court of Control with Competence in Crimes Associated with Terrorism, by Judge José Macsimino Márquez García, published this Friday and to which we had access.
That same Special Court had appointed the intervening board for ICM Proyectos 2021, but when it was in charge of Judge Luisa Renée Garrido who left on leave last Monday, August 8 after issuing such a sentence.
For this reason, this Court was left in the hands of Marquez García, who received a letter last Thursday signed by the lawyers Betty Quintero and Julio César Terán Martínez requesting the suspension of the intervening board “since it not only harms the legitimate and constitutional rights of my clients, but also affects a company that is dedicated to providing services to the oil industry in Venezuela, thus affecting a public utility asset.”
When analyzing the measure taken by Judge Luisa Renée Garrido, Judge José Macsimino Marquez García detected seven weaknesses that place it as a decision presumably apart from the lines established by the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice and thus left it settled in this new judgment.
“It was not clearly expressed in the decision if the Ad Hoc board are justice auxiliaries…the powers were not expressed…”, says Marquez García, among other considerations.
Judge Marquez García devoted several paragraphs to describing the role of the Public Ministry in the Venezuelan penal system. To do this, he cited a ruling of the Constitutional Chamber (1,747, August 10, 2007) where it is indicated that “according to the provisions of article 2 of the Organic Law of the Public Ministry (it) is autonomous and independent, so that no judicial instance can force him to accuse the omission of a certain crime, or tell him how to conclude an investigation.”
And precisely, Judge Marquez García recalled in the sentence that Judge Garrido asked the National Prosecutor’s Office 94 to send the file related to the criminal investigation opened to ICM, a request that the Public Ministry approved. Once the file was in her office, Judge Garrido exercised “judicial control” over what the Public Ministry was investigating and appointed the intervening board.
Based on these supports, Judge Márquez García agreed to suspend the supervisory board of ICM Proyectos 2021 appointed last week by Judge Garrido and emphasized that he makes such a decision “in order to guarantee the development of a judicial process without constitutional violations.”
The idea of intervening in ICM Proyectos via the courts was presumably decided in the United States by an associate of Carlos Vechio, an opposition leader who in turn calls himself on Twitter as Venezuela’s ambassador to that nation.
