Former Secretary of Domestic Commerce William Moreno He will face a new oral and public trial. From April, the Federal Oral Court (TOF) 8 of Comodoro Py will try him for the crime of disturbing the exercise of public functions for not allowing a vote in 2010 in a meeting of Papel Prensa in which he offered those who were at the meeting helmets or gloves that he took out of a red bag.
“Helmet or gloves? I have a helmet and I have gloves. What do they want? There is a choice of helmet or gloves because the judge said that we have to behave well. The last time he said that we didn’t behave well, a gil came and threw a punch and broke his finger. So now so they don’t break their fingers, helmet or gloves? They have a choice.” Moreno said at the August 12, 2010 assembly that was recorded.
Moreno was prosecuted in November 2017 by the federal judge Julian Ercolini. Now the TOF 8 judges, Gabriela Lopez Iñiguez, Nicolas Toselli and Sabrina Namer, set for April 19 at 8:30 a.m. the beginning of the oral trial, they informed Infobae judicial sources. The process will be by videoconference with Moreno as the only defendant for the crime of disturbing the exercise of public functions, which has a sentence of 15 days to six months in prison.
For the trial, 73 witnesses were summoned, including Alberto Macheira -then president of the assembly of Papel Prensa-, Martin Arecha -coadministrador judicial-, Julius Saguier -one of the owners of the newspaper La Nación, which together with Clarín are the owners of Papel Prensa- and former officials Daniel Rest, Alejandro Vanolli and Ricardo Nissen. Moreno’s defense, in charge of the lawyer Alexander Ruaasked to be cited Hector Magnetto, CEO of Grupo Clarín, but the TOF rejected him because he was not in the assembly.
Moreno, as a representative of the national State in Papel Prensa, participated in the assembly and was denounced for preventing the vote on item 12 of the day’s agenda. It was regarding the change in the composition of the commission in which the State was going to remain in the minority. “Here we are not going to vote on what the shareholders of the private sector want in any way. All my male officials from this moment bank what they have to bank. There is no voting hereMoreno said in the filming of the assembly that is proof of the trial.
The incident occurred at the toughest moment in the fight between the then government of Cristina Kirchner and Grupo Clarín. At that time, the government had promoted the law for the democratization of the media, which was prosecuted.
Moreno, an economist by profession, was an official of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner. From 2003 to 2006 he was the Secretary of Communications, until 2013 he was Secretary of Internal Trade and then until December 2015 economic attache of the Argentine embassy in Italy.
It had under its orbit the control of prices and inflation, which generated controversy due to its forms and policies, mainly due to the discussion of its intervention or not in the INDEC. Today he is very critical of the government’s management of Alberto Fernandez and Cristina Kirchner and in the legislative elections last year he presented himself as a candidate for national deputy for the province of Buenos Aires outside the Frente de Todos.
The trial will be in charge of TOF 8, Moreno will have Rúa as defense attorney and the accusation will be in charge of the federal prosecutor Marcelo Colombo and the complaints of Hernan Verdaguer, former director of Papel Prensa, and of the newspaper La Nación.
This is the third oral trial that Moreno will face. In the first, he was sentenced in October 2017 to two years and six months in prison and lifelong disqualification from holding public office by the Federal Oral Court 5 for the crime of embezzlement for having used public funds to buy merchandise with the legend “Clarín Miente ”. That sentence was confirmed by the Federal Chamber of Criminal Cassation and is appealed in the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation.
In the second trial he was acquitted in December of last year for a similar act for which he will now be tried. He was accused of having disturbed an assembly of Grupo Clarín in April 2013 in which he participated on behalf of the state together with the current governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Axel Kicillof. That trial had the particularity that it was carried out without a prosecutor because all the representatives of the Public Prosecutor’s Office since the case was investigated understood that there was no crime. The accusation was in charge of the Grupo Clarín complaint. The judges who acquitted Moreno are the same ones who will now judge him once more.
And the former official has a fourth case brought to trial. It is due to the alleged manipulation of INDEC data. He was investigated by his management as Secretary of Internal Trade and was only raised in the first quarter of 2007 when the data of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) was altered. The rest, following 15 years of processing, continue to be investigated.
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