The Broad Front created a follow-up commission on the case of the former presidential custodian, Alejandro Astesiano, which will be made up of senators Liliam Kechichián and Alejandro Sánchez, deputy Mariano Tucci and the vice president of the left-wing coalition, Verónica Piñeiro. The president of the political force, Fernando Pereira, said last Monday that “it is important that the Political Table (of the FA) issue an opinion on the subject”.
“We are in a complex case,” said the MPP senator, Alejandro Sánchez, who in dialogue with The Observer he interpreted that the issue came to have “a very large derivation with three complicated components” outside of the initial hypothesis of false passports for Russian citizens. “First, the denial of the government, which has denied Astesiano. This is like Jesus, they denied it three times”he claimed.
“First, they had no indication that he had links to organized crime, and everyone knew who he was, with 29 judicial notes. The president says he is surprised and that this is a personal problem, but the truth is coming out of a “A little bit and he is pulling down all those shadows. The president told us that he had put his family in Astesiano’s care, and then the president’s wife came out to say that he had nothing to do with the family,” the senator said.
“Then they came to Parliament and tried to deny that Astesiano was the head of the presidential guard, with all the power that that entails,” he said. “I am convinced that the Astesiano case uncovered a pot of corruption“, concluded the emepepista.
Regarding the statements by white senator Jorge Gandini, who maintained that he was the one who organized the meeting between a senior Emirati official and President Luis Lacalle Pou through the last meeting of the World Inter-Parliamentary Union (UIP), Sánchez stated: “Gandini says that, but everyone knows that when you want to have a meeting with someone, you don’t use a single name. I don’t rule out that Gandini and the IPU have spoken with these people to generate that link, but there they also threw out contacts in the Foreign Ministry to go for diplomatic channels, they didn’t get much response and then they went directly to the heart of the government: Astesiano”.
La Diaria published days ago the WhatsApp chats that are part of the investigation folder in which it is revealed how an embassy official contacted the former presidential custodian to arrange a meeting between the number three of the United Arab Emirates and the president Uruguayan.
The MPP senator also accused the government of “denial” for maintaining that Astesiano “is a mythomaniac, that he invented everything and that people believed it when communicating with him.”
“In my opinion, Astesiano was not a parsley, as (Senator Graciela) Bianchi says, but he was not the brain. Here is someone who pulls the strings and makes those people who pulled the strings go higher,” Sánchez asserted. who assured that there are “two public problems”: “One is if it was allowed to be done, and there you are an accomplice. The other is that (Astesiano) did it and you did not realize it. Both are serious. By action or omission they are politically responsible ” .
“I am very calm with the president’s statements. He says that you have to go to the bone, although you have to accompany it with actions, with your government giving more information to Parliament and that the president tells his ministers to remove from office preventive way to the people involved,” said Sánchez, referring to numbers two and three of the National Police, who are being investigated in the case led by prosecutor Gabriela Fossati. “There are hierarchies that are, I don’t know if they are responsible or not, but you have to separate them in the meantime. They are not guilty until proven otherwise,” the opposition senator declared.
