Lucia Salinas
07/03/2020 - 13:00
- Clarín.com
- Politics
The Government suffered another setback in its fight to intervene to the cereal giant Vicentin: the justice rejected its pretension so that the discussion for the validity of the Decree of Necessity and Urgency (DNU) that ordered the intervention be carried out in the contentious administrative justice of Buenos Aires .
On June 19, the Reconquista commercial judge Fabián Lorenzini returned the company's board of directors to the administration and reduced the role of the auditors appointed by Alberto Fernández -Gabriel Delgado and Luciano Zarich- to that of "controlling watchdogs". The government, through the Treasury Office, asked that the auditors be reinstated, as well as the province of Santa Fe and Zarich himself.
Meanwhile, the proposal made by Vicentin regarding the supposed unconstitutionality of the DNU that ordered the intervention of the firm was also open. The contest judge himself said that it was "a disruptive situation consisting of the intervention of the administrative body ordered by the National State within the framework of a DNU, with a view to complying with a future and eventual law of expropriation of society or its goodwill ".
Lorenzini understood that he was not the competent judge to decide whether the administrative decision of President Fernández about a company that has its preventive competition open was unconstitutional, as claimed by the cereal company.
Then, the government demanded that this discussion - whose jurisdiction, according to many specialists, is the administrative litigation par excellence - be transferred to the Federal Capital. To do this, last week he made a presentation through the Ministry of Productive Development, in charge of Matías Kulfas. The brief was presented before the Buenos Aires federal administrative contentious judge María Alejandra Biotti, who had to define whether to enable the judicial fair to process the request.
For Judge Biotti, "there is no doubt that the presentation made by the Vicentin SAIC board of directors corresponds to the contentious administrative-federal jurisdiction on the basis of the matter, since a federal rule is contested with arguments of a strictly constitutional and conventional nature."
Later, he considered that as the main effects of the DNU occur in the Santa Fe town of Avellaneda, where the registered address of the company is located, "it is not reasonable for a court located almost 800 kilometers from the Avellaneda town to" resolve " in an action aimed at questioning the constitutional validity of the DNU, the effects of which, as stated, occur almost exclusively in that place. "
For this reason, it determined that the discussion on the DNU of Alberto Fernández and the claims made by the National State against the decision of the judge of the contest "must be resolved before the federal courts with administrative contentious jurisdiction, in the town of Avellaneda, Province of Santa Fe , before which the interposition of inhibitory will correspond if the National State deems it pertinent ".
The Government can still appeal this decision, and then it will be a court of appeal that determines where the constitutional of the intervention of Vicentin should be discussed.
