The National Control Authority (ANC) of the Public Ministry resolved to suspend the prosecutor for six months Jose Domingo Perez just days after the acting prosecutor of the Nation, Tomás Gálvez, separated him from the Lava Jato case.
Peru21 learned that the precautionary measure is applied in the administrative process that was opened to Pérez, in October of last year, after the Constitutional Court (TC) ordered the annulment of the investigations carried out against the presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori for money laundering.
The investigation initiated by the ANC aims to determine whether Pérez incurred functional violations for maintaining the investigation that was carried out in 2017.
The TC established that payments made to proselytizing activities before November 2016, when money laundering was incorporated into the property receipt modality through Legislative Decree 1249, are not considered crimes.
Fujimori is accused of having received illegal money to finance his 2011 and 2016 campaigns, which ran until June.
And not only that. The highest interpreter of the Magina Carta also concluded that the Prosecutor’s Office did not corroborate whether the money used by the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht to finance the Fujimori party came from an illegal source.
However, only a criminal judge will determine if the TC sentence is applied in that way, or if it is not executed and the Fuerza Popular leader will continue to be accused.
Although due to the meaning of that ruling, the ANC warns that Pérez Gómez may have committed irregularities by not respecting due process, and in that sense it projects that the appropriate sanction, once the procedure is completed, is dismissal.
Calculated measurement?
The measure against prosecutor José Domingo Pérez occurs a week after the acting prosecutor of the Nation, Tomás Gálvez, ordered the deactivation of the special teams, including the Lava Jato team.
With that decision, he removed the senior prosecutor Rafael Vela from the coordination and Pérez as a member. But the latter, unlike the rest of the team’s prosecutors who were referred to the Money Laundering Prosecutor’s Office to continue with the cases, was definitively left out of the investigations.
Furthermore, the suspension comes after the same prosecutor Pérez declared to the newspaper La República that he will continue to perform his duties.
“I have to continue. I am a career prosecutor. Nobody gave me my position,” he declared.
Although the Lava Jato team no longer exists, the investigations remain in the hands of the same prosecutors who now have Germán Juárez as their leader, who obtained the convictions against former presidents Martín Vizcarra and Ollanta Humala.
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