Spanish
Santo Domingo.- The Dominican Supreme Court of Justice (SCJ) ratified this Friday the 5-year prison sentence for former ruling party deputy Rosa Amalia Pilarte, on charges of money laundering of resources from drug trafficking.
The Supreme Court plenary rejected the appeal of the former legislator of the Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM) for the province of La Vega (north), who was judged in that instance for the parliamentary immunity that corresponded to her at the time of the accusation.
The sentence also ratified the payment of a fine of 2,000,000 million pesos (just over $37,000). The defendant filed an appeal for cassation against the sentence issued by the Second Chamber of the Supreme Court in May 2024 on July 15 of last year.
In its ruling, the Supreme Court indicated that the defense's arguments lacked merit, according to a statement from the Judiciary.
"It was verified that the defendant's accounts registered millionaire transactions since 2001, which evidenced the continuity of illicit operations," reads a part of the sentence.
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The high court also argued that while the former congresswoman declared income of approximately 16 million pesos (about $253,000) between 2003 and 2021, she moved more than 4.4 billion pesos (about $70 million) in her accounts -in that same period-. This, like the Supreme Court, revealed "an irreconcilable discrepancy with its declared economic activity." Pilarte was a congresswoman in the four-year period 2020-2024. The sentence underscored that the convicted person acted with knowledge of the illicit origin of the assets and transferred multiple properties to the shell company Inversiones Inmobiliaria Cutupú, in what constituted a "typical pattern of placement, layering and integration characteristic of money laundering". For the Supreme Court, the conviction is based on "sufficient evidence, reasonable indications and valid assessments made in court", therefore rejecting "all the means proposed by the defense". Pilarte's husband, Miguel Arturo López Florencio, alias Micky, and the couple's children, José Miguel López Pilarte and Miguel Arturo López Pilarte, also face charges of money laundering from drug trafficking.
