The case of Christina Fifuentes has been brought before the Supreme Court. This Tuesday, the criminal court will examine the verdict of the Madrid courts, which acquitted the former president of the Madrid community and condemned the professor and advisor who participated in the falsification of his master’s protocol at Ray Juan Carlos University. But the case goes to the Supreme Court without Difuentes: only Maria Teresa Feito has appealed against the conviction for forged documents, and neither the prosecution nor the university has questioned the acquittal of the former president of Madrid. According to case sources, the public ministry demanded the two-year imprisonment of Feito, who was then an adviser to the Ministry of Education.
The case of Christina Fluentes was discovered by elDiario.es in March 2018. A series of reports on how Christina Fluentes earned a master’s degree in autonomous law from Ray Juan Carlos University with false remarks: The official achieved that years after enrollment, several subjects in which she appeared to be “not submitted” were noticeable. The documentation also read how and to whom he submitted his master final project: only one minute elapsed between the qualification of the upcoming subject and the master final project.
The exclusivity of this newspaper prompted Cifuentes and the URJC to give explanations, and it was then that the president of the region addressed the Madrid Assembly and published several signed protocols which, he said, showed that all his master’s degrees had been properly completed. The court investigation left it in black and white that these fake records were made by teacher Cecilia Rosado after receiving 15 calls and notifications from Maria Teresa Feito, an advisor to the Ministry of Education of the then Madrid executive. Which the judges later defined as “persistent and absolute” performance so that the protocols were falsified.
The case moved from Madrid’s 51st District Court to the Provincial Court, where Cristina Fluentes was acquitted, Feito was sentenced to three years in prison for forging documents, and Rosado was sentenced to a year and a half for the same offense, but with a mitigating factor. In collaboration with Justice. The High Court of Justice subsequently upheld the acquittal of the former president of Madrid and reduced the sentences of two defendants: Feito’s sentence was reduced to two years in prison and Rosado to one year. In practice, and unless the judges say otherwise, they do not have to serve a mandatory sentence in prison.
Only part of the case will be heard by the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court this Tuesday. Judge Carmen Lamela, who will be the rapporteur, has on the table Feito’s appeal against two years’ imprisonment and the prosecutor’s request for the appeal to be dismissed and the sentence upheld. According to elDiario.es sources, Cecilia Rosado has not appealed and the allegations do not call into question Christina Fifuentes’s acquittal. The debate will therefore be on whether to confirm or reduce Feito’s sentence.
Maria Theresa Feito was an adviser to the Ministry of Education at the time, headed by Rafael van Grieken, but her connections with the URJC went even further: she herself was a friend of Fifuentes, a professor of English philology at the university where he was head. Advisor, he was a professor of chemistry. He was also a board member of the Institute of Public Law, where he studied for a master’s degree. It was he who attended an emergency meeting on March 21, 2018 to prepare a false protocol for Professor Rosado, which states that Fifuentes defended his master’s dissertation on July 2, 2012, two years before the points change. The teacher agreed, the judges said, “for fear of possible negative consequences for his work.”
His first sentence, three years imposed by a Madrid court, involved his forced incarceration. However, the High Court of Justice in the capital decided to reduce the sentence to two years: the judges said he had committed the crime by falsifying an official document, but reduced the sentence in the sense that he was on leave. As a professor at the URJC and, consequently, “had no responsibility at the university, nor for the academic management of the degree of Master of Public Law in the Autonomous State, the documentation of which was found to be in breach, nor did he hold public office.”
Christina Tsifuentes resigned from the presidency of the Madrid community a month after elDiario.es revealed irregularities in her master’s degree and a few hours after the 2011 video was broadcast from a supermarket security camera, which recorded the then vice-president of the assembly. Preserved after stealing some creams. The case went to court in January 2021, almost three years after the newspaper first reported it, and his acquittal was signed in February of that year: judges found all sorts of violations in the management of his records proven, but not that he had interfered in the falsification of protocols. He exhibited himself in the Madrid Assembly to defend his innocence.
His academic work in the Masters, according to the Madrid court, “revealed a set of relevant inconsistencies that are incompatible with the regular work of the postgraduate student.” From never leaving a class to contacting a teacher to “fraudulently modifying” his or her scores. But the judges concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prove that he was at the end of the chain of pressure on Professor Rosado to falsify his records. “Without neglecting his interest in having all the documents that would justify the legitimacy of obtaining a master’s degree, nothing has been proven to have facilitated, offered or pressured him to falsify this document,” a Madrid court said.
The suspicions, according to the judges, may be “legitimate”, but there was no more evidence. Something that was ratified by the Madrid Supreme Court four months later: “The Court of First Instance based its acquittal not only on documentary evidence, but also on the means contained in the defendant’s statement and the testimony of many people.” The magistrates stressed .. The prosecution appealed the first acquittal, but further examination of the case revealed that he had decided not to transfer the case to the Supreme Court. The final chapter of the Cifuentes master case will be decided four years after receiving the first information from elDiario.es, so that the magistrates of the Criminal Chamber will not have to study the role of the former president of the Madrid community.
Source: El Diario
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