Supreme Court of Justice leaves firm condemnation against Iván Moreno

On March 15, the Criminal Cassation Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice announced denied the nullity brought by the former senator, Iván Moreno - involved in the recruitment carousel scandal - in which he alleged that his procedural rights had been violated, according to him, the high court had not taken into account all the evidence submitted by their lawyers.

With this nullity Moreno, Moreno sought to destroy the 14 years in prison he was convicted of stealing millions of money from the Bogotá budget in the company of his brother, then mayor Samuel Moreno, councillors, politicians and businessmen.

The former senator wanted the Court to evaluate new material evidence, but the high court decided that the application had no legal basis, since the acts of corruption of which he was convicted were carried out when he was a senator of the Republic.

According to the high court, the acts of corruption for which he was convicted were carried out while he was still a senator of the Republic.

In 2021, through a letter sent to the Supreme Court of Justice, Moreno notified the Supreme Court that it will not attend the trials it is carrying out against it again.

In the letter, which is copied to the United States Department of State and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, IACHR, Moreno Rojas states that, “I will not continue to legitimize by my presence the wrongful actions and illegal actions of the Supreme Court as I wrongly did in the past. That is why from today on I will not ask for evidence, I will not exercise any recourse, nor will I plead in any way”.

Therefore, according to the former senator, accused in a new trial for having received at least 6 billion pesos to favor the award of an ambulance contract for the Bogotá health system during the administration of his brother, the Colombian highest court of justice is deliberately ignoring a series of evidence that appears to be conducive to their defense.

With these, he refers to at least 100 testimonies, documents and reports of the Technical Body of Investigation, CTI, of the Attorney General's Office, including Nos. 611969, No. 9-25394 and No. 1209; and even a letter rogatory from the United States Department of Justice, written in his favor.

“Unfortunately, the neurobiology of my judges has led to a lack of knowledge of the minimum judicial rights and guarantees that any citizen has, translated into endless, unfair and illegal convictions, investigations and trials carried out by the Supreme Court, which today I completely ignore and cannot respect, because they have has been the result of actions and decisions rigged with undue pressure of all kinds,” warns Moreno, who has paid 14 years in prison since 2014 for his role in other irregularities of the aforementioned carousel.

The accusations on the subject of the ambulance scandal, for which former councillor Omar Mejía Báez was acquitted on April 8, were turned against Moreno on March 15, when the Instruction Hall of that corporation formulated a new charge of embezzlement for appropriation and improper interest in the conclusion of contract 1229 of 2009, with which the Ministry of Health of Bogotá contracted a pre-hospital care and patient transfer service in the city worth close to $67 billion.

According to the court, it would have been the former senator who, taking advantage of his influence as a member of the Congress of the Republic and brother of the then mayor of the Colombian capital, managed to secure that contract, in 2009, in the hands of Unión Transporte Ambulatorio Bogotá.

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