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Gustavo Moreno, former Anticorruption Chief of the Prosecutor’s Office, threw a score of congressmen and former magistrates into the water. His sayings were key to convicting three people and have another five on trial, but he also inflated two other cases that have already been shelved.
On June 27, 2017, an unusual piece of news led to one of the judicial scandals of the decade: a high-ranking public prosecutor was captured that day inside his own office. It was the then director of the Anticorruption Unit, Luis Gustavo Moreno, who had come to that position after being a lawyer for congressmen and senior officials. The arrest had to do with having demanded $ 100 million from the former governor of Córdoba, Alejandro Lyons, in the United States, to stop the multiple investigations against him. Moreno did not sink alone and his statements have splashed at least twenty people. Three and a half years after his capture, so goes the toga cartel scandal.
(Read also: Who is Francisco Ricaurte, recently convicted by the toga poster?)
Moreno turned on the fan shortly after being apprehended and said that his demand for Lyons had not been isolated, but rather because, together with magistrates and lawyers, he had a criminal organization dedicated to twisting processes in the Supreme Court. His sayings were key so that the former president of that high court and Moreno’s former partner in a law firm, Francisco Ricaurte, was found guilty this week. According to Moreno, former magistrates Leonidas Bustos and Gustavo Malo would also participate in the criminal enterprise, who had in his office processes such as those of former congressmen Álvaro Ashton and Musa Besaile, who have already accepted to have paid bribes.
Inflated statements?
Moreno also spoke of the former congressman of La U, Mauricio Lizcano. As he declared in 2018, Leonidas Bustos would have told him: “An important case is coming. We are going to collect about $ 5,000 million, it is the case of Lizcano ”. The Court ordered to investigate the former senator of La U for these events, but, after his departure from Congress in 2018, the case went to the Prosecutor’s Office and this newspaper learned that in November of that same year it was ordered to file in favor of Lizcano. In that decision, signed by former prosecutor Fabio Espitia, it is read that Moreno himself later clarified that he was not aware that an act of corruption had been “processed” and, therefore, “it is not possible to affirm the existence of a crime.” .
(Also read: “Many names are missing on the toga poster”: former prosecutor Gustavo Moreno)
“To avoid Mauricio Lizcano a long and painful bench, to which so many Colombians are subjected, we asked the Court and the Prosecutor’s Office to be very intensive and detailed in the investigations, they did them, they filed them and the probity of the former senator was proven”, his lawyer, Mauricio Pava, told this newspaper. Something similar happened with the former conservative senator Hernán Andrade: in 2018 the Supreme Court closed the process, after concluding that there was no crime in the $ 2,300 million that it turned over to Moreno, but that these monies were in payment for his lawyer services, that always complied with the law.
Recent moves
Three of the alleged clients of Moreno’s criminal organization requested a place in the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) and all three have already been accepted. Former senators Álvaro Ashton (from the Liberal Party) and Musa Besaile (from La U) achieved that, in addition to the cases against them for alleged links with paramilitary groups in the Caribbean, the special court assumed the investigations they had into the cartel of the toga. Although the Prosecutor’s Office and the Attorney General’s Office opposed this corruption case entering the courts created to investigate facts of the conflict, the JEP ended up ratifying their decisions, even with the blessing of the Constitutional Court.
(You may be interested: Toga poster: details of the accusation against former magistrate Leonidas Bustos)
Third on that list is former conservative senator Julio Manzur, who, although he has been singled out in this scandal, has not accepted having paid bribes. He only entered the JEP for the case he has had for years for parapolitics and the Prosecutor’s Office was left with the investigation against him for the toga poster. In fact, The viewer He learned that last week Gustavo Moreno detailed in an interview how the meetings that he allegedly held with Wadith Manzur, Julio’s son and representative to the Chamber, were. Apparently, it was Manzur Jr. who mediated with Moreno and his criminal organization to twist the process against his father in court. The Prosecutor’s Office asked Moreno to expand his version.
The rest of the condemned
Although Ricaurte’s will be the fifth conviction for this corruption scandal, his case has a particular ingredient: it is the first of those convicted who has not admitted any responsibility. Moreno was sentenced to four years and ten months in prison, and his partner, fellow lawyer Leonardo Pinilla, received a similar sentence. In February 2020, justice accepted the preliminary agreements with former prosecutor Alfredo Bettín, convicted of abuse of authority, and with former assistant magistrate Camilo Ruiz, who is paying five years in prison for having received bribes from former congressmen who sought to stop his processes. The four of them have turned on the fan.
Alfredo Bettín, as a delegate prosecutor before the Court, led the process of the former governor of Valle del Cauca, Juan Carlos Abadía, for the allegedly irregular provision of libraries in the department. Although he had the indictment of charges against Abadía ready for more than three years, he did not formally link him to an investigation by suggestion, said Bettín, of former magistrate Ricaurte. Camilo Ruiz, for his part, was the assistant to the magistrate of the Criminal Chamber Gustavo Malo and would have received $ 200 million from former congressmen Nilton Córdoba (from Chocó) and Argenis Velásquez (from Putumayo) to hinder the processes that were against him for facts corruption in their departments.
Ongoing cases
Moreno became the star witness and, to a large extent, it is his statements that have the former magistrates Gustavo Malo and Camilo Tarquino on trial today. Malo’s trial entered the final stretch in the Court’s Trial Chamber this week. After his defense requested dozens of evidence and they were denied it over and over again, this time he chose to challenge the magistrates who are handling his case, an appeal that will have to be resolved before entering concluding arguments and hearing a ruling. On the other hand, the process against Tarquino entered the preparatory phase last February and, according to this newspaper, his defense requested practically the same witnesses that the Prosecutor’s Office has.
(See: This is how the DEA uncovered the toga poster: details of the encounters between Moreno, Lyons and Pinilla)
In addition, the trial against former congressmen Julio Eugenio Gallardo (from San Andrés), Argenis Velásquez (Putumayo) and Nilton Córdoba (Chocó) continues. They would have given, respectively, $ 300, $ 200 and $ 200 million to Gustavo Moreno when he was still a trial lawyer to make decisions in his favor in the Supreme Court. All three have pleaded not guilty, as has former Governor Juan Carlos Abadía. Although it has been more than a year since the former prosecutor Bettín promised to speak against him, this newspaper learned that Abadía has not even been called for interrogation as an indicted, because, apparently, no indications have been found that the former governor have paid the robe poster organization.
