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The CTI of the Office of the Attorney General of the Nation made effective the capture of former magistrate Francisco Ricaurte Gómez, who appeared at the Paloquemao Judicial Services Center to attend the order of the Tenth Court of Knowledge of Bogotá, which issued the sense of conviction against him .
On the morning of this Wednesday, Ricaurte tried to turn himself in, but apparently the arrest warrant against him was not ready. Hours later on the Twitter account of the Prosecutor’s Office the arrest was confirmed.
Yesterday, the court issued a conviction against the former president of the Supreme Court of Justice of Colombia, for participating in a criminal organization that sought to favor legal proceedings in exchange for money.
“With these acts of corruption, as the star witness of the Prosecutor’s Office has called it and it cannot be otherwise, the jurisprudence also considers these acts as acts of corruption,” alleged the judge who issued the ruling of a scandal that known as the “toga poster.”
The Prosecutor’s Office requested in September 2017 the arrest of the former magistrate, following the request of the Supreme Court to investigate Ricaurte and also another former president of the corporation, José Leonidas Bustos, accused by a senator of having demanded money in exchange for not initiating an investigation against him.
Now the judge condemned, while waiting to determine the penalty, Ricaurte for the crimes of conspiracy to commit aggravated crimes, bribery for giving or offering, in a homogeneous contest; improper use of privileged information and influence peddling.
In the trial it was demonstrated that “former magistrate Francisco Javier Ricaurte Gómez, together with some judicial officials and a group of lawyers, promoted and directed a criminal organization that, on at least three occasions, received gifts to intercede in the course of criminal proceedings against constitutional gauges ”, as explained by the Prosecutor’s Office in a statement.
The Justice agreed with the Prosecutor’s Office that “the existence of the criminal organization is proven”, in which the lawyer Luis Gustavo Moreno was in charge of receiving the money from the defendants, to then distribute it with Ricaurte and other people, who were in charge of determine the sentences in favor of the defendants.
Some of the judicial processes that were proven corrupt were those of former Congressman Álvaro Antonio Ashton Giraldo, of the Liberal Party, who gave 1,200 million pesos (about 333,000 dollars) for delaying, archiving or prescribing the investigation against him for alleged links with paramilitarism .
In another case, former senator Musa Besaile Fayad, from the U party, also paid 2,000 million pesos (about $ 555,000) to stop an arrest warrant against him also for parapolitics, and the former governor of the department of Valle del Cauca Juan Carlos Abadía also paid 30 million (about 8,300 dollars) to delay a process for corruption.
For this reason, the court ordered the arrest of Ricaurte “so that he may be deprived of his liberty as a consequence of the meaning of the conviction.”
