Former Miss Colombia Valerie Dominguez provided private letters between her and her ex-fiance in the defense against her alleged involvement in the Agro Ingreso Seguro (AIS) subsidies scandal.
With the letters, Dominguez’s defense has aimed to show that she was blinded by love and coerced by the power of her ex-boyfriend, Juan Manuel Davila, when she signed a few papers requesting a loan from a bank. She claims that she was unaware of the irregularities that awarded the Davila family grants of $1.5 million from a government-funded subsidy program that was intended to promote productivity and competition while reducing inequality in Colombia’s agriculture.
Both the prosecution and the defense have already made clear that she signed an application for a grant of about $160,000 from the Ministry of Agriculture that was intended for an irrigation and drainage project, but whether she knowingly committed a crime or not is what merits this case.
However, according to a lawyer in the case, Pedro Escorcia, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse for noncompliance.”
The ex-beauty queen had already agreed to cooperate with authorities after a six-hour interrogation last April when she said, “I am completely ready to collaberate with the justice system because I fully trust it.”
In one of 20 or so correspondences to her ex-boyfriend, Dominguez wrote, “You know you’ve made a mistake (blame whoever), you know that I’m paying for it.”
Davila had written about the future of their relationship explaining, “It is not that I don’t want you to or that you could forgive me… you started screaming like a very rude crazy person… you tell me that we are fine, that we don’t need to have more problems than those that we already have, but look how you react.”
The former Miss Colombia hopes that the letters will give evidence to her innocence such as one that reads, “I know that you’re doing what you can, and I want out of this, but I don’t understand… Don’t blame me like you always do; I am the one that has the least to do with this.”
Dominguez on Thursday tried to convince the judge that she “unknowingly” ended up being a beneficiary of AIS.