Guillermo Moreno sentenced to 3 years in prison for abuse of authority and destruction of public records

Guillermo Moreno at the first hearing of the oral trial (Photo: Adrián Escándar)

Former Secretary of Domestic Trade Guillermo Moreno was sentenced today to three years of conditional imprisonment in the oral trial for the alleged manipulation of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) data of the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INDEC) during the last half of 2007. The measure was taken by the Second Federal Oral Court of Comodoro Py, which also sentenced Moreno to six years of disqualification from holding public office. The former official was found guilty of the crimes of abuse of authority and destruction of public records.

This is the third sentence that the former official of the governments of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner has received. He has one of two years and six months in prison for the case of the merchandising with the legend “Clarín Miente” and the second one is a two-year suspended prison sentence for the case of the “Helmet or gloves?” in a 2010 assembly of the company Papel Prensa. Both are under review and today’s sentence can be appealed by his defense to the Federal Court of Criminal Appeals.

The Oral Court also sentenced Beatriz Paglieri, former director of Consumer Price Indices, to three years of suspended imprisonment and six years of disqualification from holding public office, and acquitted employees Marcela Filia and María Celeste Cámpora Avellaneda, the other defendants in the case. The ruling was signed by judges Rodrigo Giménez Uriburu, Jorge Gorini and Néstor Costabel.

The sentences are not to be served in prison and Moreno and Paglieri will have to abide by rules of conduct such as establishing a residence and complying with the rules of the Patronato de Liberados. The judges will announce the grounds for the ruling on September 4, from which point the parties may appeal.

Moreno heard his sentence via video conference, like the rest of the parties, while the judges were in one of the courtrooms of the Comodoro Py courts, and had already said his last words before the court in the morning. “There is an old saying that is `facts, evidence and law.` There was no evidence, I rule out that there will be law,” the former official had said.

Moreno also pointed out that there was an academic argument from prosecutor Diego Luciani who, together with José Ipohorski, accused Moreno of having committed the crimes of violation of secrets, abuse of authority, destruction of records and documents, and ideological falsehood. They asked that he be sentenced to four years in prison and 10 years of disqualification from holding public office.

The Oral Court in charge of the oral trial (Photo: Adrián Escándar)

“Luciani’s argument was intelligent. He had no evidence and appealed to an academic judgment. The prosecutor cannot evaluate whether INDEC worked badly during a government when what is being judged is a semester. That is a huge mistake,” he had said in his final words.

In order to request the conviction, the prosecution had pointed out that “they were bringing down the indices with hammer blows.” “Inflation was not supposed to go over 10 percent and they managed to do so by lying,” Luciani said in his arguments. He added: “Moreno, through Paglieri’s introduction, had managed to access all the confidential information that was forbidden to him.”

In their arguments, the prosecutors asked the Oral Court to open an investigation against the former Minister of Economy of the Nation, Felisa Miceli. They argued that the INDEC depended on their Ministry and not on Moreno’s Secretary of Commerce, so they understand that an investigation should be carried out to determine whether the former official could have also committed a crime. The judges resolved in the verdict that the complaint should be handled by the Prosecutor’s Office.

The trial began last April and the prosecution pointed out during the process that the law establishes the confidentiality of INDEC information. “From the testimonies it was unanimously learned that, since Paglieri’s arrival, they began to extract daily a large number of photocopies of the index forms that were accumulated in folders so that Paglieri could then take them out of the agency,” said Luciani, and explained that the photocopies were made by Filia and Cámpora Avellaneda.

Prosecutor Ipohorski said that in order to keep inflation rates low, a system of price caps was introduced that could not exceed 15 percent per product. The Prosecutor’s Office also said that at INDEC there were plainclothes police officers who controlled employees and some of them were even locked in offices. There were also dismissals and withdrawal of passwords or tasks.

The defense attorneys for the four defendants rejected the accusations and asked for their acquittal. “Moreno never received copies or originals of inflation surveys. He didn’t even know they existed,” said Alejandro Rúa, the former official’s lawyer, in his arguments.

Beatriz Paglieri, also convicted, and her public defender (Photo: Adrián Escándar)

Rúa recalled Moreno’s statement at the beginning of the trial in which he said that the position of Secretary of Domestic Trade was offered to him by Néstor Kirchner in 2006 when he was President of the Nation. Rúa said that the request was to “generate a framework of coordination that could lead to inflation below 10%” and that for that Moreno carried out a “policy of price conversation.” “Conversation with all sectors of the economy, not just some, he managed and coordinated all the prices in Argentina,” said the defense and denied that there was any manipulation of the indices.

The trial that ended today was Moreno’s fourth oral trial and his third conviction. In October 2017, he was sentenced to two years and six months in prison and a life ban from holding public office for the crime of embezzlement for having used public funds to buy merchandise with the legend “Clarín Lies.”

And in July 2022, he was sentenced to two years of suspended prison and six months of disqualification from holding public office for the crime of coercive threats in the case of “Helmet or gloves?” which he offered at a 2010 meeting of the Papel Prensa company. Neither of these sentences are final, since they were appealed and, therefore, were not executed.

Meanwhile, he was acquitted in December 2021 for having disrupted a meeting of the Clarín Group in April 2013 in which he participated as a representative of the State together with the current governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Axel Kicillof.