Three members of a family group report that they are victims of a criminal structure dedicated to swindling with the irregular sale of a property.
The subjects offer for sale an apartment located in the Tuscany building, Los Palos Grandes, Chacao municipality (Miranda) and then, when the buyers take possession of the property, they proceed to denounce them as invaders.
Colbe Orlando Parra Rodríguez, his wife María Angélica Hernández González and her mother, María Angélica González de Hernández, fell into this scheme.
The story of how the events happened is contained in an appeal for protection filed before the Criminal Judicial Circuit of the Metropolitan Area of Caracas.
This document states that the three victims “are currently in a total state of terror, legal insecurity and unrest.” This is because José Ángel Silva and Eliecer Peña Granda, who acted as managers in the alleged sale of the apartment, filed a complaint in 2012 with the then Attorney General Luisa Ortega Díaz. Twelve years after that complaint, that is, in July of this year, two prosecutors from the Public Ministry accused them of invasion, gathering and false attestation.
Hence, in the amparo action, prosecutors Jefferson Jesús Padrón Martínez and Henry Arcenio Santos are identified as members of that criminal structure that defrauds with the alleged sale of the apartment in question.
The plaintiffs point out that prosecutors Padrón and Santos act “with evident arbitrariness (…) when knowing of their jurisdictional incompetence as holder of the criminal action to resolve conflicts that by their nature must be addressed in civil jurisdiction.”
In that sense, Rodríguez and Hernández recalled in the appeal for protection that the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice has issued decisions urging the Public Ministry “not to use criminal jurisdiction to terrorize citizens through unjust and malicious submission to a criminal process when the factual circumstances clearly show that such facts must be resolved by the courts with jurisdiction in civil matters.”
They point out that the aforementioned prosecutors have offered them a kind of extortion, consisting of closing the file in exchange for leaving the apartment.
“The so-appointed prosecutors decided to use the Public Ministry to terrorize my clients by unfairly subjecting them to criminal proceedings, under the conditional threat of extinguishing the criminal action if they renounce the human right to live in adequate housing,” the plaintiffs state in the appeal for protection.
“How is it that, even though it was proven in file 01-DDC-F49-0430-2012 that we are buyers in good faith and alleged victims of the crime of fraud and extortion, the Public Ministry decides to charge us with the alleged commission of several crimes?” Colbe Parra, María Angélica Hernández and María Angélica Hernández de González ask in the appeal for protection.
