This Friday, prosecutor Emiliano Arias referred to the closure of the asipes investigation, a cause he left un held accountable, as more than 50 defendants were acquitted.
According to the first prosecutor to take the case, the decision of national prosecutor Jorge Abbott, who separated Asipes from the mother cause, the Corpesca case, affected the fate of the investigation.
“The new national prosecutor (in reference to Abbott) decided to separate everything being investigated together and the procedural fate of the case was sealed,” he argued in an interview with The Clinic.
“Once I was assigned Corpesca, and after a first analysis we did in conjunction with the police, we were able to see the same contribution mechanism in some southern fisheries, Asipes and others in the southern zone – Fipes – consistent with the same type of Corpesca mechanism,” he added.
“Given evidence of the commission of illegals associated with illegal financing of the policy, I opened these investigations in order to investigate with the same public prosecutor’s and police team, the same phenomenon, which was the illegal financing of policy by some organizations in the fishing industry. But it changed the time and way we investigated and understood the investigation by changing the national prosecutor,” he added.
After Arias, the Asipes case passed to Julio Contardo – who moved from the Prosecutor’s Office of Bío Bío to Maule and now Marcela Cartagena, who referred the case to prosecutor Anticorrupción, María José Aguayo, the proceedings from 2018.
