Former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner won a legal battle. This Monday she was dismissed in what is known as the ‘K money route’ focused on the money laundering maneuvers for which the businessman Lázaro Báez was sentenced in 2021 to twelve years in prison. This is a case different from that of Roads, for which Kirchner was found guilty in December and sentenced to six years in prison for defrauding the State. In this case, Judge Sebastián Casanello ruled in favor of the current vice president due to the lack of accusers. Days ago, the prosecutor in the case had indicated that despite the undeniable relationship between Kirchner and Báez, the leader’s participation in the money laundering operations investigated for ten years could not be proven.
After the opinion issued by the prosecutor, both the Financial Information Unit and the Argentine Treasury (Afip) also requested that the vice president be dismissed, which meant the withdrawal of all the complainants.
The magistrate rejected the request made by the civil association Bases Republicanas to be a complainant in the case, considering that it is not a “particularly offended” party and that its presentation did not meet the formal or “opportunity” requirements. Casanello stressed that, after ten years of investigation, the association presented the request on Friday with a “specific objective”: that the case was not closed.
In 2021 Casanello found Báez guilty of laundering assets for 60 million dollars between 2010 and 2013, when his name was among the state contractors preferred by Kirchnerism. Báez was then the owner of Austral Construcción, a company based in Santa Cruz, the province that was a political stronghold of Kirchnerism, which made him a millionaire thanks to juicy state contracts. A higher court confirmed Baez’s guilt but reduced the sentence to ten years.
Casanello had dictated at that time the lack of merit against Kirchner, but the prosecutor Guillermo Marijuán requested a series of evidence measures. After obtaining negative results, Marijuán requested the dismissal of Cristina Kirchner last week. The prosecutor maintains that the crime perpetrated by Báez existed, but stresses that there is no evidence that the vice president was a co-author or had participation “in that specific and specific money laundering maneuver.”
Despite the dismissal in this case, there are others open against the vice president. The most advanced is known as Highway, for which Kirchner was sentenced to six years in prison and perpetual disqualification from holding public office for fraud against the State. In the ruling, which has already been appealed, the court maintained that it had found certainties of “an extraordinary fraudulent maneuver that harmed the pecuniary interests of the national public administration.” According to prosecutor Diego Luciani, the total defrauded from state coffers amounted to 1,000 million dollars through irregularities in the awarding of 51 road works in the province of Santa Cruz. The other major cause against the former president is the one known as “Notebooks of corruption”, based on the Oscar Centeno’s notebooks, the former driver of Roberto Baratta, who was an official of the Ministry of Federal Planning during Kirchnerism. Kirchner is prosecuted as head of an illegal association in that case.
The former Argentine president considers herself the victim of judicial persecution encouraged by political opponents and maintains a harsh verbal confrontation with justice, especially with the members of the Supreme Court. Less than a week ago, she again directed her darts against the Prosecutor’s Office, which ruled out the political motive in the attempted assassination that she suffered and decided to close the investigation without going beyond the three material authors. “They want me dead or imprisoned,” she said in a letter posted on social media.
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