Prosecutor asks that the sentence be maintained

The Attorney General’s Office asked to fully confirm the conviction against former Minister Andrés Felipe Arias Leiva, as the author of contract crimes without compliance with legal requirements and embezzlement due to appropriation.

In the processing of the special challenge to the ruling issued in 2014, the Delegate before the Supreme Court of Justice held that, contrary to the arguments of the former official’s defense, the factual and legal grounds formulated at the time in the accusation of the then Attorney General of the Nation.

The concept was sent by the accusing body to the high court within the framework of the study of the challenge that the Court is advancing, based on the request to study the 17-year sentence issued against the former minister for irregularities in the secure agro-income project that was advanced during the term of former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez.

The challenge

Violation of due process and defense are the key points alleged by the former minister’s lawyers in the challenge of more than 460 pages that the Supreme Court of Justice will review and with which they seek to overturn his sentence.

In some sections of the challenge, revealed by the lawyer Jorge Aníbal Gómez, more than five points are evidenced in which they support the reason why Arias was subjected to violations of his rights during his criminal proceedings in 2014, and that he is currently he is being held in a military garrison after he arrived from foreign territory.

Arias, at the time, was convicted of irregular actions while in Uribe’s mandate the so-called Agro Ingreso Seguro (AIS) was advanced, which consisted of providing loans with low interest rates for agricultural development and Colombian farmers.

“Although the overwhelming evidence practiced in the trial, rules out fraud in the actions of Arias Leiva, that subjective component of the punishable behaviors is presumed based on dialectical exercises contrary to all logic, giving effect to a crude form of objective responsibility ”Says the document.

It draws the attention of Gómez, in another apart from the challenge, that Arias was sentenced for an agreement entered into in which evidently, in his opinion, there was nothing different from the others held at the time by the portfolio of agriculture and other ministers who passed through the entity.

“The sentence involves an evident discrimination against the former minister Arias, since he supports a sentence for acts that surprisingly only now are considered criminal, since from 1993 and until the moment in which Andrés Felipe Arias arrived at the Ministry of Agriculture, in 132 agreements were signed in this portfolio, the same as those that were reproached to him, without any other of the ministers who processed or signed them being made the slightest reproach, “says the document.

In another part of the document, the lawyer brought up that the Supreme Court of Justice condemned the former minister as a co-author, even though the Prosecutor’s Office had investigated and charged him as the author of all the punishable behaviors. What questions the defense of Arias is that the high court did not reveal “with whom or with whom it agreed to divide the work of the commission of the crimes, nor what was the distribution of the functions between them.”

In the lawyer’s opinion, the ruling issued by the high court “suffers from obvious violations of due process, more specifically the right to defense, by ignoring the postulate of congruence between the accusation and the sentence.”

It is worth mentioning that Gómez presented the challenge because the Constitutional Court months ago considered that there was a violation of the right to due process in Arias’s file. The former Uribe government official, reproached that he did not have the right to have his sentence reviewed, this taking into account that when he was sentenced, the second instance for the gauges was not in force.

Now after the ruling of the Constitutional Court, it will be a sub-chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice that hears Arias’ challenge. It is necessary to highlight that the magistrates who hear the case are not the same ones who participated in the first and only instance sentence.