Usually, the appeal on even a high-profile case is a routine affair, filled with esoteric legal points. But the corruption case of defendants in the ICE-Alcatel case involving ex-President Miguel Angel Rodriguez is exceptional.

A key prosecution point in that case was when Jose Antonio Lobo made a deal with the prosecution to turn state’s evidence in exchange for a lighter sentence.

But Rodriguez’s defense attorney, Rafael Gairaud, not only accuses Lobo of lying but also the Tribunal of lying in its written decision and quoting Rodriguez as saying something the testimony does not reflect.

In fact, during the original trial and even before the appeal, lawyers for the defendants had petitioned the court to exclude Lobo’s damning testimony. But Lobo was one of the alleged conspirators in the case and supposedly knew where the “bodies were buried,” so to speak.

Commentary: The Gairaud tactic is risky because judges don’t like to think of other judges as being liars. On the other hand, a vigorous defense is necessary because without it, Rodriguez is buried, his reputation shredded, his political future extinct.

The case, briefly, consists of an alleged conspiracy of bribed officials of the telephone company, ICE, to buy some 400,000 phone lines from the French-based telecommunications company Alcatel.

Before the trial here, Alcatel had been heavily fined violating the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for bribing officials in a number of countries including this one. A U.S. official of that country’s subsidiary was sent to prison for his part of the bribery.

Rodriguez was accused of using his political clout to favor the deal. The offending phrase Gairaud is hammering at consists of only two words, “Vamos adelante.” The lawyer notes that the phrase, which supposedly shows Rodriguez agreeing to the conspiracy, was not in the Lobos testimony.

The defense attorney pulled no punches, accusing the tribunal of issuing an illegal judgment and then essentially falsifying the record. Likewise he accused the Finance Ministry’s legal arm of giving Lobo a free pass even though he was at the core of the corruption.

During Gairaud’s hour and 40 minute discourse, he repeatedly hammered at Lobo’s testimony, claiming the record does not prove Rodriguez agreed to the conspiracy.

Federico Morales, defense attorney for another alleged conspirator, Edgar Valverde, maintained that the prosecution took the word of the international Alcatel headquarters which, he said, fooled the national company subsidiary.

Jose Miguel Villalobos, in defense of still another sentenced official, Eliseo Vargas, maintained that some of the evidence had been obtained illegally.

On Wednesday, the prosecution answered Gairaud by saying that Rodriguez should have blown the whistle on the conspiracy when Lobo first mentioned the plan to him. Presecutor Jose Alberto Rojas said, “Miguel Angel could have stopped this from coming to pass.”

But instead, added Rojas, he remained silent and thus demostrated his complicity, justifying his five-year prison sentence of the original trial.

The Rodriguez case was a particularly humiliating one for Rodriguez. He voluntarily returned to Costa Rica to face trial after resigning his important Organization of American States post.

He was met at the plane, under extensive television coverage, by OIJ agents, handcuffed and subjected to a sort of “perp walk” down the aircraft stairs and into a waiting police van. TV station cars chased the van all the way to the court complex in downtown San Jose.