With six proceedings the investigation begins to the prosecutor
Ecuadornews:
Tomorrow, at 09:00, Fernando Villavicencio, one of the complainants, will render his free and voluntary version before the surrogate prosecutor, Thania Moreno, in the alleged crime of embezzlement. Based on a report with indications of criminal responsibility and the allegations of Fernando Villavicencio and Andrés Paéz, the deputy prosecutor, Thania Moreno, began the opening of a preliminary investigation against the State’s attorney, Carlos Baca.
The report was allegedly issued by the Comptroller General of the State. The two complainants requested an urgent action to investigate an alleged crime of embezzlement against the Prosecutor, on the activities as president of the 30-S Commission, formed by former President Rafael Correa in 2013, to investigate the events that occurred on September 30, 2010 According to Villavicencio and Páez, the three members of the 30-S commission supposedly charged values, when it was not contemplated in the documents that justified the work of the members.
The complaint is covered in a report of the Comptroller of 400 pages, exposed to the Prosecutor’s Office on December 23, 2016, indicate the opponents.
Thania Moreno, who accepted the request, ordered the beginning of the investigation and ordered as initial proceedings that a police captain investigate the facts and deliver the first report within a period not exceeding 20 days, counted from last Tuesday. She also asked the National Secretariat of Intelligence (Senain) to send certified copies of the special payments made by the entity between September 2013 and March 2014.
She also asked the Comptroller’s Office to certify if he issued the report with indications of criminal liability against Baca and the two commissioners. Another willing diligence is the reception of a free and voluntary version of Fernando Villavicencio tomorrow, at 09:00, on the fourth floor of the Pichincha Prosecutor’s Office. He requested that Alfredo Veintimilla, general secretary of the Attorney General’s Office, be informed to inform him if he received in his office the official letter of December 23, 2016 and annexes, signed by Daniel Fernández de Córdova, surrogate controller, and if so, forward certified copies of the document and annex within 72 hours. Moreno requested that the Official Registry be registered to send a certified copy of Executive Decree No. 22 of June 10, 2013, for which it grants a period of 48 hours.
Prosecutor says that investigation against him lacks sustenance Yesterday, in a press conference in which he did not answer questions, the prosecutor Carlos Baca said that the preliminary investigation initiated against him by Moreno lacks technical, procedural and is based on a lampoon whose origin is unknown. In addition, it does not respond to a “judicial purpose”, but to “compliance with orders of obscure characters”.
In his opinion, the alleged report with indications of criminal responsibility was forged, since the number assigned to document (37616) of December 23, 2016 corresponds to a delegation that makes the Comptroller to two lawyers to intervene in a hearing. He recalled that to apply for the position of Prosecutor, in January 2017, the Council of Citizen Participation and Social Control requested the Comptroller to certify if the applicants, among which was Baca Mancheno, if they had any kind of evidence of criminal responsibility , administrative or culpable, the answer was that there was nothing. For Baca Mancheno, “it is very evident that the fight that has been assumed by the Attorney General’s Office and the Attorney General wants to be tarnished by particular interests in hiding corruption and favoring impunity.”
He denounced that there are interests to prevent him from continuing in the fight against corruption, which “will be unveiled opportunely” and he anticipated that there are cases of enormous gravity “where there are people potentially involved with courts of law, who find it uncomfortable the presence of a Prosecutor who does not have any stain “.
However, in his exposition of around 22 minutes, Baca, who was accompanied by his close collaborators and administrative staff, at no time referred to the questioning of the complainants, that he would have collected certain values for work in the Commission of 30 -S.
Comptroller confirms that there is no report against Baca
The Comptroller General of the State, Pablo Celi, said yesterday that there is no alleged report of evidence of criminal liability, which would have been issued by the entity under his charge, on the use of reserved expenses destined to the National Secretariat of Intelligence. In statements to a television channel, Celi recalled that 5 or 6 months ago the Comptroller’s Office issued a statement and report before a request from the National Assembly regarding the alleged existence of a criminal report in this field.
“At that time the documentary bases of the Comptroller’s Office were reviewed and that document does not appear in the files of the Comptroller’s Office, it does not appear in the documentary database, which is a fundamental requirement for the analysis of reserved expenses”.
The official anticipated that once he receives the request of the surrogate prosecutor, Thania Moreno, “I will analyze the request and give an answer with a sustenance, in the legal basis for the judgment of reserved expenses and with a sufficient support in the documentary base of the Office of the Comptroller General of the State ”
According to a decree, commissioners’ work was free
On June 10, 2013, the President of the Republic of that time, Rafael Correa, issued Executive Decree No. 22, through which the Commission established the investigation of the facts occurred on September 30, 2010. According to the document, the agency, which was composed of Óscar Bonilla, Diego Guzmán and Carlos Baca, who presided, will work for six months renewable for the same period. In addition, it established that its members will exercise the position for free, without prejudice to cover the values for travel expenses, mobilizations and others that they need to fulfill the task entrusted.
The decree ordered that the commission request the declassification of files, reports and qualified documents and that its management would end with the presentation of the final report to President Correa and the Office of the Prosecutor. After a year of investigations and compilation of information, on June 4, 2014, the Commission handed Correa the report, in which he ratified the thesis of an attempted coup d’état. The document of three chapters assures in the first conclusion that the 30-S was “an attempt of soft coup d’etat concurrent with a strategy of regional destabilization”, and determined that there are more than 50 responsible. (I)