Peru's National Judicial Oversight Authority has suspended Judge Juan Varillas Solano, head of Lima's Seventh Civil-Commercial Court, for six months over alleged irregularities in the speed with which he issued an injunction halting the sale of Grupo El Comercio.
The injunction had frozen the transfer of Grupo El Comercio, America Televisión and Canal N to Inversiones Newscorp S.A.C. and businessman César Rodríguez Larraín Salinas. The Oversight Authority, known by its Spanish acronym ANC, is the disciplinary body of Peru's Judicial Branch responsible for investigating misconduct by judges and court staff.
According to a resolution issued on 20 August, Varillas faces four separate charges. The first accuses him of drafting judicial rulings on computers outside the Judicial Branch's official network and transporting the drafts on a personal USB drive. The second alleges he gave a false account of how he reviewed the ruling. The third accuses him of refusing to hand over that USB drive when the ANC requested it. The fourth accuses him of pushing through the injunction ahead of 99 other cases already waiting for a decision in his court.
A history of disciplinary trouble
This is not the first disciplinary case against Varillas Solano. He has already been suspended twice before, in 2016-2017 and again in 2024-2025. Since October 2024, the ANC's own Sanction and Appeal Unit has had a request for his dismissal pending before Peru's National Justice Board, which has yet to rule on it.
Drafting rulings outside the court's computers
The first charge states that Varillas drafted judicial resolutions on computers that did not belong to the Judicial Branch and carried the drafts on a personal USB drive with no security safeguards. The resolution said this practice risked exposing privileged and confidential case information to loss or to third parties who could use it for unlawful purposes.
The judge himself acknowledged the practice when he gave a statement to investigators on 3 August. He said that because he lacked time to work during office hours, he took some injunction files home and worked on them using a USB drive without the work being logged in the system.
Regarding the file connected to the El Comercio case, numbered 20869-2026-43, he said he examined it outside the court, working on it at home before bringing it in on the USB drive. He said he then reviewed it several times in his office and passed it to his assistant on the same drive, who uploaded it to the court's system.
A technical report with a key detail
The ANC's Investigation and Analysis Unit examined the file's properties and produced a report that contradicted the judge's account. It found the document was created at 11:28:32 a.m. on 30 July and modified at 11:40:29 a.m. the same day, with a total editing time of zero minutes and a blank author field. The report concluded the file had not been created on a Judicial Branch computer.
For the ANC, that zero-minute editing time is the key piece of evidence. If Varillas had written the ruling on his own court computer, the file would show hours of editing, with pauses and corrections. Instead, the record shows the text arrived already finished from outside and was uploaded in a single action, which the oversight body says amounts to a breach of every judge's duty to work transparently and maintain impeccable conduct.
An alleged false statement
The second charge concerns what Varillas told investigators rather than what he did. He said he reviewed the draft several times in his office before his assistant uploaded it. But if the file's editing time was zero minutes, that detailed review inside the office could not have happened, since there is no trace of the document being touched there. The ANC believes the contradiction means the judge may have lied, something expressly prohibited by the Judicial Branch's Code of Ethics.
The USB drive he never handed over
The third charge centres on a promise Varillas broke. When ANC investigators visited his court on 3 August, they asked him to hand over the USB drive used to work on the ruling. He agreed to deliver it that same week, by Friday 7 August. The date came and went, and the device was never handed to the oversight body. The ANC says failing to cooperate with an investigation of this kind is a serious offence because it blocks the oversight work the authority is required to carry out.
Why this case jumped the queue
The fourth charge concerns the order in which cases are normally resolved. Courts are expected to decide cases in the order they arrive, unless there is a compelling reason to skip ahead, such as a health emergency or an urgent constitutional matter.
The claim filed by El Comercio's shareholders reached the court on 21 July, and Varillas already had the injunction ready just three working days later. At the same time, his court had 99 injunction requests waiting their turn, some for far longer. One case had gone more than six months without even a ruling on whether it was admissible, and another had waited nearly six months for a simple procedural correction. While those files sat untouched, the El Comercio case moved forward almost immediately.
