Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, twice president of Argentina and current vice president, has started the week with the best news she has received so far in Alberto Fernández’s troubled tenure: the justice system in her country has closed the investigation in which she was accused of money laundering.
Prosecutor Guillermo Marijuán, who for a good part of the process considered her guilty of this criminal offence, came to the conclusion that there is no evidence to convict her, and the two State agencies whose function is to prosecute this type of criminal activity and promote the accusation adhered to the words of the judge.
“Without an accusation, there is no possible criminal process,” concluded federal judge Sebastián Casanello when deciding the closure of the process known as “the K money route”, which investigated the laundering of money generated in other criminal activities, including the diversion of funds of public works, a crime for which the former president was convicted.
Both the Financial Investigation Unit (UIF, which controls money laundering) and the AFIP, the Argentine public treasury, had announced on Friday that they would not continue with the process, unlike what happened with both organizations during the four years of Mauricio Macri presidency (2015-2019).
Since Fernández took office as president on December 10, 2019, several of the main Argentine media have insisted on the existence of a pact between the head of state and the former president, which installed him as a candidate for the Casa Rosada: Fernández, known Due to her many links with the courts of justice, she had to clear the way for the current vice president, influencing so that the cases against her were closed. If this were true, this Monday Fernández would have finally fulfilled the pact.
According to the newspaper La Nación, the judge explained that “he could not ‘go beyond’ what was requested by those who exercise the role of accusers or ‘substitute for the State’s punitive mission’ because, as the Supreme Court warned, doing what Otherwise, it would violate the constitutional guarantee of due process. With an appointment to the highest court, the judge recalled that this guarantee requires that whoever accuses be “a third party different from the one who has to judge.”
No interest on the part of the State for the destination of the money that in another judicial process was confirmed as stolen from rigged contracts in public works in the years of Kirchner governments; Fernández de Kirchner can breathe: the money laundering case is wrong.
The former president was already sentenced, in December 2022, to eight years in prison and perpetual disqualification from holding public office for defrauding the State in a case of multimillion-dollar diversion of funds from public works. Along with her, Lázaro Báez was also sentenced, the man who went from a modest bank employee at Banco de Santa Cruz -the province governed by the Kirchners- to a construction magnate in a few years thanks to receiving the overwhelming majority of construction contracts. public. Baez is sentenced to ten years in prison.
“According to Marijuan, the FIU and the AFIP, there is no evidence to support that Cristina Kirchner has intervened in these operations of Báez and his entourage,” explained La Nación.
Without the support of the State, the judge confessed his impotence: “Even with the clarity of this link between Lázaro Báez and Cristina Fernández, more than ten years having elapsed since the beginning of this criminal proceeding and almost five years since the investigative statement of the one named in the framework of this file, I have not been able to gather evidence that leads me to move beyond the state of suspicion and move on to another procedural stage such as the trial”.
In any case, the legal problems have not ended for the former president. The newspaper Clarín highlighted that “despite this dismissal, Cristina Kirchner will continue to be investigated for money laundering together with Báez, in another file linked to ‘the K Money Route’ and whose central object is the millionaire patrimony acquired, compulsively , by the owner of Austral Construcciones.
Another case still open, known as the ‘Hotesur case’, aims to establish whether the Kirchner hotels in Patagonia were used to launder money. Companies such as the state airline Aerolíneas Argentinas rented enormous amounts of rooms for their rest in El Calafate, the city near the Perito Moreno Glacier, but these rooms were not used. The case involves Máximo and Florencia, the children of the former president, who were part of the hotel board. Argentine justice must decide whether to keep the case open or close it definitively.
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