[ad_1]
“Giving up your right to remain silent we come to request to be served summon an audience, so that our client, Mr. Jaime Mañalich gives judicial statement, as soon as possible”. This is how the two start briefs presented today before the 3rd and 7th Guarantee Court of Santiago by the lawyers of the former Minister of Health, who was already summoned to testify before the Prosecutor’s Office as a defendant on November 11.
Gabriel Zaliasnik and César Ramos justify this diligence in court based on the fact that “in the course of four months, counted from the presentation of the first complaint, corresponding to the mayor Mr. Daniel Jadue, The Public Ministry never took the initiative to summon my client to give a statement, in neither of the two investigations currently in force, in order to counteract these unfounded allegations through his testimony ”.
Currently, the North Central Prosecutor’s Office is processing two inquiries in which the former authority of the Ministry of Health has the quality of an accused and which refer to alleged responsibilities after the deaths and infections due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
As it has maintained on other occasions, the defense also pointed to the disclosure of testimonies from the file, noting that this, without the version of its client being known, violates your presumption of innocence. “In relation to both causes, the existence of a repeated disclosure of the criminal record is observed in the social communication media, thereby violating the relative secrecy of the investigative folder prescribed in article 182 of the Criminal Procedure Code, consequently affecting , the presumption of innocence of our client ”, reads the letter entered today.
Mañalich’s lawyers maintain then that “in this adverse context” the regional prosecutor Xavier Armendáriz was asked on October 11 that the former health minister be summoned to testify and that he intended to renounce his right as a defendant to remain silent. According to the defense, the Public Ministry still does not answer him regarding the edge in which a possible manipulation in the figures of deaths and infections by Covid is investigated, while only in the case opened for deaths in Recoleta was he already summoned to testify, a situation that would materialize on November 11.
Zaliasnik and Ramos argue before the court that “this defense is aware that the Public Ministry has summoned people to give testimony, from one week to the next, it is explicit that in relation to our client, there is no intention of receiving your statement as soon as possible, in order to refute the unfounded allegations that have been made by the complainants, Senator Alejandro Navarro and Mayor Daniel Jadue, among others, for the commission of alleged crimes, which are nonexistent, and thus carry out an objective investigation that aims to also prove the innocence of our client ”.
In this regard, defender Gabriel Zaliasnik explained to Third that “we have exercised the right to testify before a judge of the Republic before the manifest disinterest of the Public Ministry to know the antecedents and the version of the facts of the voice of Mañalich himself.”
He added that “it is not acceptable that the evident investigative bias of the Public Ministry. It is obvious that with the information that the former minister can provide, the reckless investigative thesis collapses and therefore the desire not to listen to him. Four months have passed since the first complaint, so the delay of the Public Ministry is completely unjustified, and it is only explained in the tunnel vision that has characterized this research ”.
