Comodoro Py has in his hands a definition that keeps the contenders of the Juntos por el Cambio intern for the La Plata mayor in suspense. Both Julio Garro and Juan Pablo Allan are waiting attentively to what may happen in the case where they are being investigated along with other referents for the alleged filing of files against trade unionists in the province.
It is expected that after the winter fair, Room II of the Buenos Aires Federal Chamber will confirm or reverse the prosecutions issued by the Federal Judge of La Plata, Ernesto Kreplak at the end of April of the year for considering the current mayor of the province’s capital and the legislator as necessary participants in the crimes of illegal intelligence and malfeasance.
It is that Garro and Allan participated in the meeting at the Buenos Aires headquarters of Banco Provincia on June 15, 2017 together with 12 other people including former provincial officials, spies and construction businessmen where the former Buenos Aires Minister of Labor Marcelo Villegas was heard to say “If I could have a Gestapo, a force to end all unions, I would do it”.
Villegas’s statements emerge from a recording of said meeting consigned to justice by the former comptroller of the Federal Intelligence Agency, Cristina Caamaño, of which a case was initiated in December 2021.
In addition to the pre-candidates for the mayor of La Plata, former members of the Federal Intelligence Agency, Juan Sebastián De Stefano, Diego Dalmau Pereyra and Darío Alberto Biorci, as well as other strong officials of the Government of María Eugenia Vidal such as the former Undersecretary of Justice, Adrián Grassi, are being prosecuted in the case.
Although all the defendants, mainly the former officials, denied the accusations and admitted that the meeting was held to deal with various episodes of long-standing threats and extortion carried out by construction businessmen and awarded to the UOCRA from La Plata; At the same time, one of the former spies targeted AFI directors Gustavo Arribas and Silvia Majdalani by declaring that he was in that room at the request of his superiors and that he was also commissioned to record it illegally.
The only former official who had better judicial luck was the former head of the Buenos Aires infrastructure portfolio, Roberto Gigante, who obtained the lack of merit together with the construction businessmen present there.
Before the appearance of the video and as a result of that meeting, various anonymous complaints arose against the former head of UOCRA Platense, Juan Pablo “Pata” Medina, who along with others were prosecuted for illicit association, money laundering and extortion.
The unionist’s lawyers demanded the annulment of the file on the understanding that it was a file put together precisely within the framework of that meeting. Said claim prospered and Medina was dismissed. The decision was finalized after the Federal Chamber of Cassation endorsed what was dictated by a court in La Plata. However, the prosecutor before Cassation Raúl Plée introduced an extraordinary appeal before the Supreme Court, with which the highest instance will decide.
With the appeals presented by the files and files in Comodoro Py, the Buenos Aires Federal Chamber held a hearing last June to hear the parties where “Pata” Medina himself was present, who through his lawyer César Albarracín asked to maintain the prosecutions and reverse the lack of merit of Gigante and the construction businessmen.
But that is not the only issue that judges Mariano Llorens, Eduardo Farah and Pablo Bertuzzi have to resolve. Grassi’s defense claimed that the case be annulled in its entirety. For the former Buenos Aires Undersecretary of Justice, the file must be invalidated, since it began with an illegal recording.
