At
4:30 this Saturday
, Ricardo Jaime left the Ezeiza Prison after spending almost seven years in prison.
Six convictions for corruption weigh on him and he maintains another long list of open processes in the justice system.
The deterioration of his health, and the deadlines for the start of the trial for the Cuadernos de las Coimas case - where he remained detained - led the Federal Oral Court 7 (TOF 7) to order his immediate release.
He was the last former Kirchnerist official arrested.
Under a
zealous security device
, the former Secretary of Transportation left the prison this Saturday.
He entered there on April 3, 2016, becoming the first former official of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner to go to jail accused of corruption.
He was, however, the last to get out of it.
Jaime remained detained in the
"parent cause" of the Cuadernos file
where he was prosecuted and sent to trial, for the collection of illegal payments.
In that same file, he had been sentenced to preventive detention under the same accusations but specifically for receiving bribes to grant businessmen the public transport service concession.
The same mechanics was replicated in the train service concession.
With Ricardo Jaime's release from jail, there are no longer any former K officials accused of corruption in custody.
Between 2016 and 2019 , 74 former members of the Néstor and Cristina Kirchner cabinet
were arrested
as businessmen and union leaders linked to said political space.
When Alberto Fernández arrived at the Casa Rosada, there were just over 24 prisoners
left
in federal prisons linked to cases of corruption of the Kirchner administration.
The same court accused by the government has been signing various resolutions in these three and a half years that materialized in the release of former officials, union leaders and businessmen.
Jamie was the last.
In this case, two things came together to sign the cessation of preventive detention: on the one hand, the state of health of the former Secretary of Transportation, who is 68 years old (he suffers from a carcinoma of the skull) and the legal deadlines for the trial
of
the Notebooks case.
This was stated by the prosecutor before the TOF 7, Fabiana León: "It is paradoxical that despite everything ruled and ruled, to date there has not even been any progress on the admissibility of the evidence offered by the parties for more than a year and the offer of proof by this General Prosecutor's Office. All those procedural dangers -sufficiently invoked, validated and sustained in their instances- are diluted in reasonableness due to the verified conditions suffered by the accused".
For this reason, León indicated that "under these conditions , the elementary humanitarian reasons
that inspire the institute
cannot be neglected and that, in order to safeguard the inalienable right to life and health, enable the need to weigh -after pertinent reports- the concession
of a mitigation measure".
When pondering the reasons, the Court, made up of judges Germán Castelli, Fernando Canero and Enrique Méndez Signori, determined that his preventive detention should end on March 18.
So it was that very early this Saturday morning Ricardo Jaime, who was staying in Unit 31 of the Ezeiza prison, left jail.
With the cessation of pretrial detention, some control measures were imposed, Jaime must appear in court, hand over his passport, the placement of an electronic monitoring device and the prohibition to leave the country was suggested.
The former Kirchnerist official left prison with six convictions for bribery and fraudulent administration in various files.
Jaime was even the first to admit to collecting bribes in a case in which he decided to go to a shortened trial, admitting his guilt.