Gustavo Piegas, who practiced in Russia between 2019 and 2022, was formalized for his intervention in 104 files.
Another former consul of Uruguay in Russia He was accused of falsifying passports for citizens of that country, for “repeated crimes of assumption of marital status” at the time of handing over the Uruguayan passports. He is the second diplomat charged in the investigation into the “Moscow Line” that uncovered the multiple edges of the Astesian case.
Is about Gustavo Piegas47 years old, who held the position of Uruguayan consul in Moscow between 2019 and 2022 and integrated in June 2014 a list of the National Party in the internal elections, and is currently in office in USA. The judicial process in the last stage —for the request for medical leave from the prosecutor Gabriela Fossati— was in charge of the attached prosecutor of 12th Shift, Gloria Nicoliniwhich formalized the imputation.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, Piegas intervened in 104 files which ended in forged passports, and validated several birth certificates presented by Russians to process citizenships where Uruguayan names were repeated. “All the documentation received and analyzed so far, it was possible to detect manifest irregularities in the exercise of the function of the person investigated Piegas,” Nicolini told the guarantee judge, Alexander White Asteggiante.
However, for the moment, the former consul was not charged with processing a passport for an official of the Security Services from Russia, despite the fact that this is prohibited. And although he avoided an effective arrest, the official will not be able to leave the country and had to hand over his passport as precautionary measures.
The vice-consul at the Uruguayan embassy has also been charged in the case, Stefano DiConzawhich intervened in 77 files and was formalized for 14 repeated crimes of fraud and 14 crimes of assumption of marital status.
Piegas’ defense denied the existence of evidence
Piegas’ lawyer, Marcelo Dominguezaffirmed that in the investigative folder there is no evidence to accuse his defendant of repeated crimes of assumption of marital status.
According to Domínguez, all the passport procedures carried out at the Moscow consulate were later issued by the Civil Identification Directorate, and maintained that a diplomat “does not have the qualifications or knowledge” about documentary security to discover if a birth certificate was apocryphal or not. “According to the account of the Prosecutor’s Office, those birth certificates were already adulterated when they entered the consulate,” said the defender, recalling that Piegas’ job is to see if the translations, apostilles and seals were correct or not.
For their part, the Prosecutor’s Office explained that the formalization stage of the investigation is not to present evidence, so Domínguez’s arguments must wait for the progress of a trial.
Source: Ambito
