The Public Prosecutor's Office filed formal charges against former congressman and former president of the Jury for the Prosecution of Judges (JEM), Orlando Gabriel Arévalo Zielanko, for the crime of aggravated passive bribery (a category under Paraguayan criminal law involving a public official accepting a bribe), as part of the #LaMafiaManda case. The charges were brought by prosecutors Francisco Cabrera, Verónica Valdez, and Luis Piñánez, from the Specialized Unit for Economic Crimes and Anti-Corruption, who also requested that Judge Humberto René Otazú Fernández send the case to an oral and public trial.
In the same case, Guido Javier Díaz Domínguez was charged as an alleged accomplice. According to the investigation, Arévalo allegedly requested and accepted that the late congressman Eulalio "Lalo" Gomes endorse three checks totaling Gs. 202,000,000 as collateral for a personal loan that the accused would not have been able to obtain on his own, in exchange for using his position at the JEM to favor prosecutor Stella Mary Cano in a disciplinary proceeding.
According to the Public Prosecutor's Office, the alleged agreement was carried out through a favorable vote on a formal judicial warning — a disciplinary sanction short of removal — issued to the prosecutor. The investigation was based on conversations extracted from WhatsApp messages on Gomes's cell phone, as well as reports from telephone carriers, documents provided by the Supreme Court of Justice, court records, and reports from various specialized units of the Public Prosecutor's Office.
With the filing of the charges, the case enters a new judicial stage, in which the parties will present their arguments before the competent court, which will determine whether there are sufficient grounds for the case to be heard before a sentencing tribunal.