The Federal Oral Court (TOF) 2 intervening in the case for the alleged direction of public road works in Santa Cruz between 2003 and 2015 rejected this Friday all the challenges that had been raised towards some of its members and towards the prosecutors Diego Luciani and Sergio Mola.
All the challenges had been raised after a hearing in which the defense attorneys of several of the defendants explained the reasons why they believed that the objectivity of the magistrates was in question.
The main challenges were the raised against prosecutor Luciani and the president of the Court, Rodrigo Giménez Uriburufor having shared a football team called “the Liverpool” that, in addition, on more than one occasion he went to dispute sporting events to the fifth Los Abrojos, owned by Mauricio Macri.
“I think we are facing a really very serious situation that must be analyzed as a whole. All this has mortally wounded the credibility of this trial,” said lawyer Carlos Beraldi, defender of Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
In the case of the challenges presented this Friday by the defense of the Vice President against Judge Jorge Gorini, who is accused of having visited the Casa Rosada during the government of Mauricio Macri, were rejected in limine by the three judges of TOF 2: Giménez Uriburu, Andrés Basso and Gorini himself.
This Friday morning, at the trial hearing, Gorini had explained the reasons why, on two occasions, he went to the Government House to hold meetings with the then Minister of Security, Patricia Bullrich.
“I think we are facing a really very serious situation that must be analyzed as a whole. All this has mortally wounded the credibility of this trial”Carlos Beraldi
The magistrate maintained that one of those meetings had to do with the dissemination of photos “in pajamas” of former Vice President Amado Boudou on the day of his arrest: Gorini explained that he was in charge of the case for the Once train tragedy, in which they would order the arrest of former officials with final convictions, and said that he requested the meeting with Bullrich to guarantee that situations like that were avoided.
The second meeting invoked in the recusal against him -and published on Friday by the newspaper Página/12- was for an issue of his personal security, explained the magistrate.
In the case of the challenges filed against the president of TOF 2, Giménez Uriburu and the prosecutors Luciani and Mola, the rejection occurred after the debate in the hearing and the ruling is signed only by the judges Gorini and Basso.
“After having analyzed the normative limitations related to the attempted challenge -its evident extemporaneity and the inapplicability of the alleged claim under the rule of article 56 of the National Criminal Procedure Code-, it remains to point out that, after substantiating the challenges raised, Nor do we find the degree of friendship to which the norm refers when it provides for the separation of judges and magistrates based on their relationship with those interested in the process,” Gorini and Basso maintained.
“In effect, both Dr. Luciani and Dr. Giménez Uriburu have given an account of the details of the relationship that unites them, explaining the spaces in which they have coincided in the past and also the limits that frame their bond. Based on the information they provided at the hearing held on the date and in the brief presented, respectively, we find ourselves before the evidence that the ‘intimate friendship’ for which the defenses seek their recusal, is nothing more than a story built on the basis of images from which that conclusion can hardly be inferred,” they concluded in the ruling that Télam agreed to.
