Toga Cartel: Colombia’s former Supreme Court president convicted in corruption scandal

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – A court in Bogotá on Tuesday, March 9th, sentenced former president of the Colombian Supreme Court of Justice Francisco Javier Ricaurte for participating in a criminal organization aimed at favoring judicial proceedings in exchange for money.

“With these acts of corruption, as the Prosecutor’s star witness has called it and it can’t be otherwise, case law also considers such acts as corruption,” said the judge issuing the ruling in a scandal known in Colombia as the “toga cartel.”

In September 2017, the Prosecutor’s Office requested the arrest of the ex-judge, following a Supreme Court order to investigate Ricaurte as well as another former president of the court, José Leonidas Bustos, accused by a senator of having demanded money in exchange for blocking an investigation against him.

The judge has now convicted Ricaurte for the crimes of aggravated conspiracy to commit a crime, giving or offering bribes, undue use of privileged information and influence peddling, while the sentence is still to be determined.

The trial showed that “former judge Francisco Javier Ricaurte Gómez, along with a number of court officials and a group of attorneys, promoted and led a criminal organization that, on at least three occasions, received kickbacks to interfere in the course of criminal proceedings against persons enjoying constitutional immunity,” as explained by the Prosecutor’s Office in a statement.

The court agreed with the Prosecutor’s Office that “the presence of a criminal organization has been evidenced,” in which attorney Luis Gustavo Moreno was in charge of receiving bribes from defendants, and then distributing them to Ricaurte and other people, who were in charge of ruling in favor of the defendants.

Some of the judicial proceedings found to be corrupt involved ex-legislator Álvaro Antonio Ashton Giraldo, of the Liberal Party, who paid over 1,200,000 Colombian pesos for stalling, filing or terminating the investigation against him for alleged links with paramilitaries.

In another case, ex-senator Musa Besaile Fayad, of the U party, also paid 2 million Colombian pesos (about US$555,000) to stop an arrest warrant against him also for parapolitics, and the ex-governor of the department of Valle del Cauca Juan Carlos Abadía also paid 30 million pesos to stall a corruption proceeding.

Consequently, the court ordered Ricaurte’s detention “to be deprived of his freedom following conviction.”

Source: Biochile