[ad_1]
The Supreme Court ruling that lowered the fine for businessman Julio Ponce Lerou from US $ 62 million to less than US $ 3 million, in the framework of the so-called Cascada case, continues to generate controversy.
The ruling of the highest court in the country generated outrage in the Socialist Party that described it as “a mockery for the country.”
“It represents less than 5% of the amount of the penalty initially applied by the former Superintendency of Securities,” said a public statement from the store led by Álvaro Elizalde.
Questioning the figure of Ponce Lerou, the socialists point out that the Supreme Court itself described him as an “ideologue” of a transaction structure that was aimed at his own benefit and that of related companies.
Along the same lines, they said that this situation “It seems to the ethics classes for which Carlos Alberto Délano was convicted and Carlos Eugenio Lavín, who laughed at the country and sowed widespread public mistrust in the institutions.
For the PS, Ponce represents the complete opposite of good business practices, and what happened with the ruling in the Supreme Court “only reaffirms that there is still a type of justice in Chile for the rich and a different one for others,” they say.
It should be noted that the Third Chamber of the Supreme Court closed the main civil aspect of the cascadas case, an administrative investigation that in 2014 ended with the largest fine in history and with trials that took six years to be resolved in three different instances.
A trial judge, in 2016, the Santiago Appeals Court, in 2019, and the Supreme Court, this Friday, ratified the conclusion of the then Superintendency of Securities and Insurance: Julio Ponce, as shareholder and president of SQM and the Cascades companies, committed a series of infractions to the securities laws and corporations. And that is why all those instances ratified the sanction against the employer. However, the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court lowered the original fine.
