The Second Permanent National Criminal Court of Appeals Specialized in Organized Crime decided to declare unfounded the objection made by lawyer Giulliana Loza, lawyer of Keiko Fujimori, against judge Víctor Zúñiga Urday, of the Fourth National Preparatory Investigation Court.
According to the decision of the Judiciary, Judge Zúñiga Urday cannot be considered to have committed an arbitrary act by calling a new preventive prison hearing against Keiko Fujimori Higuchi. She also points out that this preparatory investigation against the leader of the Fuerza Popular for the crime of money laundering in the framework of the Odebrecht Case should continue.
On the other hand, in the application presented by Loza Ávalos, he alleged that the judge had incurred an arbitrariness when calling a pretrial detention hearing and not a variation session of a simple appearance to pretrial detention. The lawyer added that the ruling of the Constitutional Court, which in the majority declared founded the habeas corpus of her sponsor, in November 2018, also imposed a simple appearance for the leader of the Popular Force.
However, the Appeals Chamber established that the ruling of the TC that released Keiko, ordered the annulment of the judicial orders of preventive detention in the context of execution and ratification, but not the request for detention made by the prosecutor José Domingo Pérez.
‘Giulliana Loza Ávalos argues that her defendant would be subject to the process with a measure of simple appearance, so the modification of her legal situation should be processed as a variation of that legal status to a more burdensome precautionary measure, and as has not been chosen by that means it is arbitrary that a new preventive detention hearing has been convened, based on a tax requirement of more than a year ago and on whose grounds it considers that the Constitutional Court has ruled’, says the document signed by the judges Octavio Sahuanay, Iván Quispe and Wilbert Medina.
In this way, Judge Víctor Zúñiga remains in charge of Fujimori’s case and will determine whether or not to access the current request of the Prosecutor’s Office to give Keiko a new preventive detention for 36 months.
In addition, the Prosecutor’s Office maintains that Fujimori would have incurred in crimes of money laundering, illicit association to commit crimes, criminal organization, false declaration in administrative procedure, procedural fraud and generic falsehood. These crimes are sustained based on new statements from people close to the Popular Force leader.