In 2019, the vice president incriminated the prosecutor in the Senate. This Friday, the Federal Chamber finished rejecting these false accusations.
At the beginning of 2019, the then vice president Cristina Kirchner accused prosecutor Carlos Stornelli in the Senate of “extortionist, spy and bribery” within the framework of the Pouf Operation against the cause of the Bribery Notebooks. Cristina even attacked him again during his defense in the Vialidad case.
After that grandiose “complaint”, in a Forum Shopping maneuver (choose the friendly judge), Cristina’s judicial operators brought the case against the false lawyer Marcelo D’Alessio before Judge K de Dolores, Alejo Ramos Padilla. And he denounced before the Committee on Freedom of Expression of the Chamber of Deputies, sheltered by the ultra K deputy, Leopoldo Moreau, who had discovered the cause of illegal espionage “greatest” of democracy and that compromised relations with the United States, Israel, Venezuela and Uruguay.
But shortly after starting the case in Dolores, it was found that it was completely false that Stornelli had asked businessman Pedro Etchebest for a bribe and that he had participated in an extortion attempt against him.
Now the court has confirmed that he is not a spy and he did not violate his duties as a prosecutor.
This is so because the Federal Chamber of Buenos Aires revoked this Friday the prosecution of Stornelli in another armed case in the context of the Pouf Operation against the cause of the Notebooks.
Its about case known as Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) denounced by the former secretary of Planning Minister Julio De Vido, Roberto Baratta, according to whom, through the false lawyer Marcelo D’Alessio, the illegal espionage and maneuvers to harm him in the cause for the irregular importation of this fluid during the presidencies of Cristina Kirchner.
The former judge of Dolores and current judge of La Plata Ramos Padilla had put together a case with a testimonial statement that Stornelli took from the false lawyer, in November 2018, in his capacity as former coordinator of the Finance department of the state company ENARSA, responsible for importing LNG ships. Then Ramos Padilla had prosecuted Stornelli.
However, room I of that Buenos Aires court, made up of judges Leopoldo Bruglia, Pablo Bertuzzi and Mariano Llorens first revoked D’Alessio’s prosecution for alleged illegal espionage, he gave him a lack of merit and then ordered federal judge Julián Ercolini - who today has the case - to find out how he obtained the documentation he provided to Stornelli about LNG.
D’Alessio was introduced to Stornelli by the journalist Daniel Santoro who had interviewed the former, in his capacity as a former ENARSA official, for his book “El Mechanism” on cases of corruption in energy works during the K period.
The camera highlighted that Santoro was exempt from any incriminating reproach by virtue of the secrecy of the sources of journalistic information provided for in article 43 of the National Constitution”, as the Federal Chamber of Mar del Plata had already decided in 2020 for his performance as an investigative journalist in corruption cases.
Ramos Padilla, Cristina’s judicial operators and K media had falsely affirmed that D’Alessio “had infiltrated Enarsa as a spy”, when in fact, he would have worked as advisor to the Director of Finance and current member of the Supreme Court of Formosa, Ricardo Cabrera between June 2010 and June 2011.
First, the Federal Court noted that D’Alessio’s witness statement “there was no procedural effect” in the case in which De Vido and Baratta, among others, are prosecuted for irregularities in the importation of those ships.
Before, the Prosecutor of the Federal Chamber of Mar del Plata, Juan Manuel Pettigiani, had urged the dismissal because Ramos Padilla did “an erroneous application of the law and an arbitrary evaluation of the evidence”.
The Buenos Aires court recalled that the Chamber of Mar del Plata, while the D’Alessio case was in its hands, had said that “Stornelli could not be attributed the commission of the figures provided for by the intelligence law (arts. 43 ter, 11 and 4 of Law 25,520), given that the person appointed for his functional capacity as prosecutor of the nation -and not belonging to any official intelligence agency.”
Baratta, prosecuted in the case for the importation of LNG, accused Stornelli of having taken “testimonial statement from D’Alessio on two occasions, not being in charge of the instruction delegated by Judge Claudio Bonadio and the delay in having said statements records for the consideration of the acting judge.
But the Federal Chamber of Buenos Aires held that “no irregularity observed some in the news that the prosecutor could have to motivate his functional performance of receiving the testimonial statement in question”.
“This, since regardless of not having delegated the investigation of the case, the prosecutors are authorized to request reports from national, private and individual organizationsand to summon people to give a statement (see article 7 of the organic law of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Nation -law 27,148-)”, he added.
Thus, Stornelli has, as a consequence of Operative Puf, only two current prosecutions but of private action and nothing to do with illegal espionage, bribery, extortion or breach of the duties of a public official.
