The lawyer who had provided the files to the court admitted the mistake. New seizures ordered. Last year the judge of the first investigation was removed
One of the medical records used in the expert opinion of the prosecution in the second trial on the death of Diego Armando Maradona currently taking place in Buenos Aires it belongs to the footballer’s father. This is the surprising fact that emerged in the last hearing of the trial and which could once again put the validity of the entire trial at risk. “It is such an unprecedented and scandalous situation that it is impossible to know what to do,” said Francisco Oneto, lawyer for the main defendant, neurosurgeon Leopoldo Luque. Nicolas D’Albora, lawyer for the defendant Nancy Forlini – home care coordinator for the Swiss Medical healthcare company – reported the error, but it was he who initially forwarded the information to the court. Now he explained that he simply forwarded the data without examining it in detail: “This was an inadvertent error by the Swiss Medical laboratorywhich we became aware of during the preparation of the cross-examination, since some values did not correspond to those of a patient undergoing medical treatment. It was then that we noticed how, despite an identical personal identity, the registration number and that of the medical record did not coincide”.
Risk of cancellation
Four months before the start of the new trial canceled in 2025 after the discovery that former judge Julieta Makintach was secretly filming a documentary during the hearings – the oral proceedings therefore once again risk being declared null and void. The expert report, after analyzing the entire file, including Maradona’s medical records and tests, concluded that the former football world champion was not treated adequately in relation to his clinical picture and that his death could therefore have been avoided. Maradona died on 25 November 2020 while recovering from a delicate head operation to remove a subdural hematoma.
The prosecutor accuses
“Only whoever set the trap could know where it was hidden.” Thus Patricio Ferrari, one of the prosecutors in the trial on Maradona’s death, commented to the press before entering court on the scandal of the exchanged medical records which could now result in a second sensational annulment of the entire trial. Subsequently, already during the hearing, Ferrari took the floor to denounce “a media operation with the aim of muddying the waters”. “They deceived us, they committed a crime and now they want to drop the trial when it is almost over (…) but I’m sorry to say it, it was of no use to him, they won’t be able to make him fall”, he then added. Yet another twist in the trial in which the seven doctors who treated Maradona were accused during his stay following a delicate head operation for the removal of a subdural hematoma took place on Wednesday. One of the medical records used in the expert report by the prosecution’s experts turned out to belong to the footballer’s father, an episode for which responsibility is now being blamed of the private health insurance (Swiss Medical) to which the deceased champion of Napoli and the Argentine national team belonged. At the end of his speech, prosecutor Ferrari, together with the lawyer of Diego’s daughters, Fernando Burlando, requested to search the offices of the health insurance and the two clinics where Maradona had been treated, in order to seize the original medical records.
