Almost 200 witnesses were included by the High Complexity East Prosecutor’s Office in the indictment presented yesterday before the 8th Guarantee Court of Santiago. This is the list that the investigators of the Penta case, Carlos Gajardo and Pablo Norambuena, expect to be approved by the court and incorporated as evidence in the oral trial, although it is not clear when it will take place.
This is because in the last few weeks the defenses of different defendants have asked the court to reopen the investigation because there were proceedings that were still pending when the case was closed on March 4.
According to sources close to the investigation, one of the first names on the list of people to be presented is the former auditor of the Internal Revenue Service (SII) Iván Álvarez, who would testify about his relationship with the late auctioneer Jorge Valdivia and the links he had with different workers of the agency and of Empresas Penta. This is the origin of the case.
Álvarez agreed to an abbreviated procedure last month and was sentenced to five years of intensive probation.
As the former SII official acknowledged having carried out actions in favor of Penta, the prosecutors also add to the list the treasurer of Penta S.A. Juan Carlos Armijo and other executives of the holding company; for example, Marcos Castro S. (also charged in the case), in charge of the accounting and management control area of the Penta company.
In addition, a series of people related to what was known as the political side of the case would appear on the list, according to the same sources. Two of the names in this section would be the former President Sebastián Piñera and the former presidential candidate Andrés Velasco.
The list continues with Nicolás Noguera, manager of Bancard, who should refer, among other things, to a forward signed by Administradora Bancorp -part of the family office of the former President- and CB (linked to the Cruzat group) and, for example, of the labor relations he had with Jaime de Aguirre and Mario Conca, when they worked at CHV and Bancard was their employer.
Conca himself would be another of the witnesses on the list that the prosecution expects to include.
In addition to the extensive list of witnesses, the Public Prosecutor’s Office seeks to include abundant documentary evidence in the trial, given the nature of the crimes under investigation, particularly tax crimes, such as the provision of ideologically false invoices and receipts, or the filing of maliciously incomplete or false tax returns, among others.
The guarantee court, however, is now in charge of defining what evidence will or will not go to trial.
Trial
Defenses seek to reopen the case and this could delay the trial.
El Mercurio, 15 March 2017.