The Oral Economic Criminal Court No. 1 rejected the ex-minister’s proposals Julio De Vido and the former head of Customs Ricardo Echegaray to be dismissed and excluded from the oral and public trial for the cause of the entry into the country of the suitcase with 790,550 dollars by the Venezuelan businessman Guido Antonini Wilson in 2007.
The defense of the ex-minister of Federal Planning had claimed weeks ago the prescription of the accusation against him and the “manifest absence of crime” in the trial. Its defenders raised before the Court the annulment of the prosecutor’s request for trial and, eventually, the incompetence of the economic criminal jurisdiction to judge the facts. “If the money was for political campaigns, it is a crime of the Criminal Electoral Justice, of Servini de Cubría,” he told PROFILE on March 8, one of De Vido’s lawyers, Maximiliano Rusconi.
Meanwhile, magistrates Luis Losada, Ricardo Fornari and Diego García Berro rejected the proposals of both Echegaray and De Vido to send the case to electoral justice, as well as the request to declare the case prescribed because it was processed beyond the deadline. reasonable term, as 16 years have elapsed since the event occurred, he recorded The nation.
De Vido’s strategy to avoid trial in the case of the Antonini Wilson suitcases
This Wednesday, March 22, the process began with the investigative statements, where the defendants are expected to have the opportunity to defend themselves and answer questions.
In this trial, the former head of the Road Concessions Control Body (OCCOVI) Claudio Uberti and four other defendants who were customs officials at the time: Rosa Garcia, Maria Gallini, Jorge Lamastra and Guillermo Lucangeli.
In her statement at the hearing, Rosa García – who at that time was the head of Customs in the jurisdiction of Aeroparque Jorge Newbery, where the episode occurred – said that they woke her up in the early hours of the morning to inform her of the discovery of the money, she explained. the aforementioned medium.
That, he pointed out, was framed as a customs infraction and not as a smuggling crime: María Cristina Gallini, head of the baggage shift, and Jorge Lamastra, who was a Customs guard and checked the suitcase, demonstrated along the same lines.
The trial will have hearings every Wednesday, and a hundred witnesses are expected to testify.
After 16 years the trial for Antonini’s suitcase begins
Antonini Wilson: what happened on August 4, 2007
On August 4, 2007, Venezuelan-American businessman Antonini Wilson tried to pass through customs control at the Jorge Newbery metropolitan airport in the City of Buenos Aires a suitcase with 790,550 dollars.
The aircraft from Caracas arrived at the southern terminal of Aeroparque private flights at dawn, and came from its country of origin, Venezuela. It was a private flight contracted at that time by the state company Enarsa.
On that flight, Antonini Wilson was traveling with Uberti and officials from the Road Concessions Control Body, with whom he came to Buenos Aires to participate in the presidential summit between Néstor Kirchner and Hugo Chávez: in those days it was yet to be defined who would be the Kirchner’s candidate in the presidential elections.
Two days after the discovery, the meeting of the leaders was held at Balcarce 50, in which officials and businessmen from both countries participated. Sources of the investigation indicated that Antonini entered thanks to José María Olazagasti, former private secretary and right-hand man of Julio De Vido. The images that confirm the presence of the “valijero” in Casa Rosada sparked an international scandal.
Antonini Wilson, considered a “rebel” by the Argentine Justice because he left the country as soon as what happened was made public, settled in the United States and his extradition was not achieved.
AG / ED
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