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Former Cartagena magistrate Francisco Ricaurte comes from a political family and had a brother, who was called Naruto that he was convicted of drug trafficking. He went through the presidency of the Supreme Court of Justice and through a “revolving door” reached the Superior Council of the Judiciary. Today he became one of those convicted by the toga poster.
In the morning of this March 9, a judge in Bogotá convicted and sent former magistrate Francisco Ricaurte to jail, who was declared responsible for organizing a corrupt network in which congressmen and senior officials, in exchange for millionaire sums, negotiated decisions before the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice, in the middle of the last decade. Ricaurte was the first convicted by the toga cartel who did not accept responsibility, since other involved obtained a reduction in sentence after submitting to collaborate with the justice system.
In context: Toga poster: Francisco Ricaurte, former president of the Supreme Court, is sentenced.
In fact, the former anti-corruption prosecutor Luis Gustavo Moreno, sentenced in 2018 to four years and 10 months in prison, served as Ricaurte’s executioner in the criminal trial of the former magistrate, as the Prosecutor’s Office called him as the main witness and, before the judge of the case , he aired all the information that his memory allowed him on the poster of the toga. Moreno said, as he has done for four years, that he and Ricaurte set up an alleged law firm in Bogotá, where clients sought “immunity” from investigations in the Supreme Court of Justice.
Now Francisco Ricaurte, affected by health and to the doors to enter the third age, as his defense alleged, he will return to prison while his team of representatives fights, in the second instance, the possible acquittal of the former magistrate. For now, everything indicates that Ricaurte will spend the next few years of his life far from his native Cartagena, the city where he was born as a lawyer and where he grew up next to a family related to the public function. His father Rafael Ricaurte was a Conservative leader in the walled city and one of his brothers, José, was a minor mayor in La Heroica.
Francisco Ricaurte studied law at the University of Cartagena and when he was just over the age of majority, at the age of 20, he became a clerk in one of the courts in the capital of Bolívar. In accordance with Snail RadioFor eight years he worked as a collaborator of the office and as a judicial assistant in the Attorney General’s Office and, in 1990, at the age of 28, he took office as a municipal judge. During the following years he concentrated on the branch of law that took him to the Supreme Court in his adulthood, being appointed a circuit labor judge in Cartagena. He did so well that he won a scholarship to specialize at the Javeriana University in Bogotá.
In the Gabriel Giraldo de la Javeriana building, where the lawyers of the Alma mater from Ricaurte, the condemned today obtained the highest grade in his class. Shortly before finishing his specialization in Labor Law, Ricaurte met the then magistrate Germán Valdés, whose nascent friendship led to an appointment as a judge in Barranquilla and, months later, taking him as an auxiliary magistrate and right-hand man at only 36 years old, an achievement for him. guild of law in Colombia. By then, Ricaurte was already married and had three children.
Background: Toga poster: versions found in the face of the sentence of Francisco Ricaurte.
Three, for example, were also Ricaurte’s attempts to take office as a magistrate of the Supreme Court of Justice. In his first nomination he reached 14 votes, with two to go to one of the most respected positions in the Judicial Branch. On his third attempt, Ricaurte told in an interview with The viewer In 2008, the convicted man achieved the minimum vote and made a space in the Labor Chamber of the high court. 2004, that was the year of his entry into the big leagues. Just four years later, in 2008, Ricaurte was appointed president of the Supreme Court of Justice.
Although in an interview with this newspaper, Ricaurte confessed to having voted for former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, both in 2002 and 2006, he also acknowledged that one of the hardest moments of his career was to face the conviction of Yidis Medina, who in June 2008 – when Ricaurte was president of the Supreme Court – was sentenced to four years in prison for, as she confessed, having sold her vote to approve Uribe Vélez’s presidential re-election project. “For me it was clear that we could not fight against Uribe’s popularity, that’s why we always place ourselves in the legal field,” Francisco Ricaurte explained then.
In November 2010, Francisco Ricaurte bought three neighboring lots in Senda de Garagoa, Boyacá. Each piece of land cost him $ 100 million, where a repose farm was later built. Later, when the toga cartel scandal broke, those properties entered investigations for possible corruption. On the other hand, the former assistant magistrate Camilo Ruiz, convicted on February 26, 2020 for his participation in the “criminal enterprise”, explained that in September 2015 the former prosecutor Luis Gustavo Moreno invited him to that farm in Garagoa, to present him with Ricaurte . The idea of the meeting was to agree business with the files of the former representatives of the Chamber Nilton Córdoba and Argenis Velásquez.
Background: “This trial has only been a media show”: defense of Francisco Ricaurte.
Some time after leaving the Supreme Court of Justice, in 2012, Francisco Ricaurte was appointed a magistrate of the Administrative Chamber of the Superior Council of the Judiciary, a position in which he had to select the candidates for robes in the Supreme Court and in the Council of State . In June 2014, the Council annulled his appointment, as he was selected in the Administrative Chamber by the same officials he had appointed in the previous high court where he worked and where he was president. A cross of favors. Later, Ricaurte worked as an independent lawyer and was hired as legal advisor to the Financial Fund for Development Projects (Fonade).
During the time that Francisco Ricaurte worked as a freelancer, he set up an alleged law firm in the company of former anti-corruption prosecutor Luis Gustavo Moreno, in the north of Bogotá. For years it gave the appearance of legality, but today a Bogotá judge determined that it was a facade to sell judicial decisions in the Supreme Court of Justice, a high court where he had allies such as the suspended magistrate Gustavo Malo, of the Criminal Chamber, who he also has an investigation on his shoulders. When did Ricaurte’s luck change? The day that the former governor of Córdoba, Alejandro Lyons, denounced Moreno for having charged him a millionaire bribe in exchange for helping him in a file, in 2017.
Also read: Ricaurte tries to prove that Moreno took advantage of him: Prosecutor’s Office in final arguments.
Since then, the principals involved in the toga cartel scandal have fallen. Luis Gustavo Moreno was captured on June 27, 2017 and in less than a month he was charged with the crimes of concussion – taking advantage of his function – and using privileged information. In May 2018, Moreno reached an agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office and promised to link names. The most important ?: Francisco Ricaurte. In September 2019, the Prosecutor’s Office captured the former president of the Supreme Court for the crimes that a judge endorsed today in a hearing on the sense of judgment. For a time he was free due to expiration of terms, but as of today everything indicates that he will return to prison.
However, Francisco is not the first member of his family to be sentenced to prison. In October 2015, the Supreme Court upheld the extradition to the United States of Rafael de Jesús Ricaurte, brother of the lawyer who was the protagonist of the toga cartel. The man was required by the US government for the crime of “conspiracy to import, manufacture and distribute five grams of cocaine for illegal importation into the United States.” Rafael de Jesús Ricaurte was known in a criminal organization as Naruto and he paid around two years in prison for trafficking “five kilograms and more of mixtures and substances that contained a detectable quality of cocaine,” as the indictment stated.
:: Read here the last interview of Luis Gustavo Moreno with El Espectador about the toga poster scandal ::
