The Buenos Aires Federal Chamber confirmed this Monday the rejection of a motion for annulment by a businessman prosecuted in the so-called “Cause Notebooks”who had claimed to invalidate the accusation against him due to the changes that detected an expertise in the writings of the accused collaborator in the Oscar Centeno case.
The decision was made by the chambers of Chamber I of the Court of Appeals Leopoldo Bruglia and Pablo Bertuzzi, who confirmed that the accusation against the businessman Armando Loson must continue until the oral trial and rejected the motion for annulment, according to the resolution to which Telam had access.
“It does not escape the court that the defense claim pointed to the declaration of nullity of the annotations referring to Loson as a whole and not only of the fragments (words) that would have been altered”they held in the ruling.
However, “this solution requires that the incorporation of the evidence would have infringed the procedural provisions, against the guarantees of the defendant, which does not emerge from the file.”
“In such a way that the questions formulated must necessarily be redirected to the discussion about the value or probative force of those elements”, something that should happen in a future oral and public trial, they concluded.
On the other hand, when ratifying a previous decision by Judge Julián Ercolini, who is now handling the case, the Chamber took into account that “the content registered in the ‘notebooks’ (eight copies in total, from 2005 to 2010 and from 2013 to 2015) was timely ratified by Centeno, who served as driver of Roberto Baratta, former Undersecretary of Coordination of the Ministry of Federal Planning, in his statement as accused collaborator.
They further held that the main part of the case has already been sent to oral proceedings and is in the preparation stage before the Federal Oral Court 7.
“In such a way that, as anticipated, we consider that the trial is the natural environment where the author of the annotations will be able to eventually answer the questions that are formulated and the party will also be able to widely assert all the evidence and defenses that they make to their allegations,” added the House ruling.
Rejecting Loson’s claim last November, Ercolini argued that “even disregarding the words that would have been altered, the annotations substantially retained their meaning.”
Loson had filed a criminal complaint for the alterations, erasures, overwritings and amendments that were detected in the digital copies of the notebooks submitted for expertise, which are currently being investigated in another court, that of Marcelo Martínez De Giorgi.
The result of the tests
An official expertise ordered by the court detected more than 1,600 adulterations in three of the notebooks, whose digital copies were analyzed, since the originals are safe at the headquarters of the court that is preparing the debate.
Loson’s defense presented a petition to invalidate the content of the notebooks that Centeno wrote and his statement in the central case, linked to his person and his company, Albanesi.
The Chamber also confirmed the rejection of a proposal to close the case against him for “absence of a crime.”
In the case, the former president and current vice president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, former officials of her Government and a hundred businessmen for alleged bribery for the award of public works are being prosecuted and already sent to trial.
