Lava Jato case suspended for third time

The preliminary hearing of the Lava Jato case scheduled for Tuesday, June 1, was suspended for the third time, due to a disability presented by a defense lawyer. At least 42 people are charged, but the prosecutor will request the dismissal of eight of them. The hearing will take place in March next year.                

The Lava Jato operation originated after an investigation that began in 2014 in Brazil, which revealed an international network of bribes paid by the Brazilian company Odebrecht to Latin American governments in exchange for public contracts.”This is an investigation that began in 2016 as a result of news events in which it was linked to the Lava Jato or Triple X operation in Brazil, linked to a law office in Panama that provided financial legal structures for the concealment of the money from  illicit activities,” “explained  the lead prosecutor”

The prosecutor affirmed that “the Public Ministry had all the evidentiary elements to support its fiscal view, to ha punishable elements that prove the fact and the connection.”

Among the defendants are Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca Mora, from the defunct law firm Mossack Fonseca, which is linked to the creation of offshore companies and the alleged money laundering, product of the payment of bribes.

“Deep down there is no justification, there is nothing, I can swear to you, that if I am struck by lightning if there is something against us …”, Ramón Fonseca Mora, the founding lawyer of the Mossack Fonseca, told the media. after hearing the suspension of the preliminary hearing.

Earlier, he  argued that the accusations against the law firm he represents are “false” and that the process followed in the Lava Jato case “is a litmus test for Panamanian justice.” Fonseca indicated that what they want to prove in this trial is that “selling Panamanian corporations is not a crime, it is done every day, and it is done every day throughout the world because the world walks with corporations.” According to Fonseca, the firm sold 25,000 corporations, and “the money they say we washed is the thousand dollars they paid us for each company.”

The preliminary hearing was scheduled to take place at the Balboa Theater which had been converted overnight into a courtroom  to accommodate trials with a large number of defendants

At around 7:00 am, the files, consisting of a total of 275 volumes, were downloaded in vain.