The lawyer Diego Cadena, who is known for having worked as a defender of former President Álvaro Uribe, is currently facing trial for the crime of bribery in criminal proceedings, for the alleged attempt to manipulate a witness in order to favor the Ex leader.
The trial that was scheduled for this Wednesday, July 5, 2023 at 8 in the morning in Court 3 of the Bogotá Circuit, which was summoned to hearings against Cadena also on Thursday, July 6, had to be postponed at the request of the Office of the Attorney General of the Nation, for next Tuesday, August 8, 2023.
Cadena reached these instances after an extensive judicial process in which the Prosecutor’s Office claims to have sufficient evidence to show that the lawyer offered legal benefits to the former paramilitary Carlos Enrique Vélez, alias Víctor.
Within the probative material collected by the accusing entity, it is documented that Cadena went to the Palmira penitentiary center in Valle del Cauca on July 18, 2017.
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There, the lawyer Cadena supposedly spoke with Vélez and agreed to give him money in exchange for the ex-paramilitary modifying his statement against his client, Álvaro Uribe. The details of said dialogue are those that are under investigation and that will be the subject of discussion in the trial.
For its part, the defense of the criminal attorney assures that these illegal offers of money were not made to alias “Víctor”, and that the money delivered to him was for travel expenses; although the investigators apparently have evidence that two million pesos were consigned to him, in addition to other money that was delivered to someone close to the ex-paramilitary.
The objective of the delivery of that money that will be the subject of discussion in the trial, is that Vélez supposedly spoke well of former President Uribe within the process opened against him by the Supreme Court of Justice, for the alleged manipulation of witnesses and procedural fraud. .
With the resignation of former President Uribe from his seat in the Senate of the Republic, the process against him passed to the Attorney General’s Office, an entity that has twice requested the estoppel of the file, because it considers that Álvaro Uribe is innocent.
However, this same situation is not preached by the accusing entity towards Diego Cadena, because he was accused of bribery in criminal proceedings, which it is said that he would have committed together with his partner Juan José Salazar.
In the list of people whom Cadena would have contacted to carry out illegal actions, there are also names such as the ex-paramilitary alias Diana or the ex-paramilitary Juan Guillermo Monsalve, who on one of those visits recorded what he spoke with the criminal.
Regarding the intercepted conversations between Cadena and Uribe to talk about the inmates and the visits to prisons, to which they themselves argued that they were only going to seek the truth, the defense of the lawyer Diego Cadena appealed that these interceptions had to be declared illegal. because they were part of the client-attorney relationship.
Meanwhile, last April of this year, the Superior Court of Bogotá determined that the evidence collected was legal and that it was ordered by the Supreme Court of Justice. “In other words, it is evidence obtained by court order, and consequently, in a completely lawful and legal manner, all the more so since it was declared so by the Supreme Court itself in an order dated August 3, 2018,” the high court indicated. .
Taking this background into account, it will have to be debated in the trial stage that is about to start whether Diego Cadena is responsible for bribery in criminal proceedings that he was charged with.
In disciplinary matters, the National Commission for Judicial Discipline, in its Valle del Cauca section, issued a sanction against the criminal. In it, he took away the practice of the profession for 34 months since, according to the entity, he gave gifts to alias “Víctor” to testify against Senator Iván Cepeda, Uribe’s political rival. with Infobae