A veteran Peronist politician who served in both Kirchner governments has been sentenced to three years behind bars for falsifying official data, though he will not go to jail.
Buenos Aires City Oral Federal Criminal Court No. 2 sentenced former Domestic Trade secretary Guillermo Moreno to three years in prison after finding him guilty of tampering with the INDEC national statistics bureau’s monthly inflation figures and other data.
The former official has further been disqualified for six years from holding public office by the conditional sentence.
Federal prosecutors Diego Luciani and José Ipohorski had asked for four years’ imprisonment and a 10-year disqualification, in the case where Moreno had been indicted for the crimes of abuse of authority, breach of secrecy, destruction of records and documents and misleading representation of the facts on seven different counts.
Judges Néstor Costabel, Rodrigo Giménez Uriburu and Jorge Gorini further handed out an identical conditional sentence to co-defendant Beatriz Paglieri, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) director of INDEC under Moreno, while ex-officials Marcela Filia and María Celeste Cámpora Avellaneda were both acquitted.
This is the third sentence for Moreno, a former official during the governments of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who served as Communications secretary between 2003 and 2006, and as Domestic Trade secretary from 2006 to 2013.
The first conviction had been in a case probing the misuse of public funds to finance a “Clarín miente” (“Clarín lies”) campaign; and the second for threats in the “¿Casco o guantes?” (“Helmet or gloves?”) case made at an assembly of the newsprint company Papel Prensa.
While the first two cases are under review, the lawyers of last year’s Principios y Valores presidential hopeful are expected to appeal Wednesday’s ruling.
The parties heard the court’s sentence by videoconference, while prosecutor Luciani maintained in his closing statement that the defendants “hammered [inflation] rates down” and that thanks to mendacious data they kept inflation in single digits. He also requested that former Economy minister Felisa Miceli be investigated in the same case.
Moreno, in turn, said in his closing statement that there was an “academic statement” by prosecutors.
”It was intelligent, because Luciani had no proof. The prosecutor cannot assess whether the INDEC worked poorly during a whole government when what is on trial is half a year. That is a huge mistake,” he said.
The conditional sentences for Moreno and Paglieri are not to be served in prison and must be subject to such rules of conduct as defining a residence and complying with different types of regulations.
The investigation against the former Trade secretary started in 2007 through a complaint filed by the lawyer of the NGO Asamblea por los Derechos Sociales (“Assembly for Social Rights”) and is based on journalistic publications showing irregularities in the dismissal of former CPI director Graciela Bevacqua.
According to the charges, the Peronist leader replaced Bevacqua with Paglieri given the refusal by then CPI head to provide him with information according to his criteria with Paglieri “making a number of daily photocopies” of government price recommendations to substitute shop prices with the possible aid of Filia and Cámpora Avellaneda.
In addition, the NGO filing the complaint had also warned about tampering with the INDEC inflation figures as from January 2007.
– TIMES/PERFIL
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