Our partner Gabriel Zaliasnik called for a review of the problems with the economic crime law and acknowledged that the criticism came “a little late”.
In his speech, President Gabriel Boric made reference to the “present note” filed by the CPC with the Constitutional Court, through the lawyers Gabriel Zaliasnik and Constanza Hube, in which they alleged “unconstitutional defects” in the law on economic crimes.
“The fact that some business associations have appealed to all instances, such as the Constitutional Court, ends up strengthening this legislation. Beyond the legal aspect, I must confess that I regret that at the time of advancing in legislation of these characteristics that reestablish trust, we do not all join actively in this direction”, said the President.
In this respect, the lawyer Gabriel Zaliasnik said in a conversation with “El Mercurio” that “I believe that we did strengthen the legislation by detecting the problems it had. Now we hope that the Government, the Executive and the Congress will take charge of repairing and rectifying, because if not, we would have had a legislation in which nobody would have presented the problems it has”.
“I believe that the ruling of the Constitutional Court must be read well”, he adds, “because what is in this decision of the Constitutional Court is that it is raising problems of unconstitutionality and this is done by a no lesser number of ministers”.
What problems do you identify in the law?
“There is a very serious violation of certain criteria of equality before the law. The concept that finally underlies is a statute or an order of punishment much more severe than for other citizens. In other words, there are now two ways of calculating sentences in Chile. One for all Chileans and another for those who are senior executives or company directors.”
“One problem has to do with the application of criminal procedural rules, because at the end of the day this can translate into a kind of overload of cases that are going to lead to oral trial in a procedural system that is not designed to support that amount of burden.”
“The character of exercising an elevated role in the organization, that is, a hierarchical position of management or board of directors, leads you, on the one hand, to define the fact that normally for others it would not be as an economic crime. Second, it leads you to the existence of a very qualified aggravating circumstance, which deprives you, therefore, of the benefits of sentence reductions. Third, it deprives you of the alternative penalty. Three times you consider the fact for the same situation”.
“The law has a lot of things that are good and it’s not that it’s all bad, but it has problems, it has flaws.”
The lawyer responds to criticism that they could have outlined these problems earlier. “This is legislation that was done under a certain smokescreen, it was done quietly,” he says. He alludes to the fact that the law was presented after the outbreak, and was processed in the midst of the pandemic and the work of the Constitutional Convention.
“The focus was on the constituent process and not on dry legislation on the sentencing mechanism,” he points out.
“The truth is that there was not a state of tranquility and legislative transparency that would have allowed us to have timely picked up many of these criticisms. I agree when some people tell me that we were a little late in raising the criticisms,” says Zaliasnik.
However, he calls for self-criticism. “I ask the Government and the Congress to be open to correcting those defects that have been raised with grounds. Refusing to see them seems to me that it would be arrogant, it would be an arrogance that does not help us to have a better legislation”.
“There I do concede the point to President Boric, it would definitely strengthen the legislation, because it would make it much more perfect, more objective and it would not depend so much on the interpretation made by the operators”, he concludes.
