The Federal Chamber of Cassation, the highest criminal court, reopened the case Hotesur-Los Sauces and ordered that the vice president Cristina Kirchner faces an oral trial in which she will be investigated for her hotel businesses.
The vice president had evaded the process because in November 2021 a ruling by the Tribunal Oral Federal 5 -court that was supposed to judge her- unexpectedly dismissed her along with her children, Máximo and Florencia Kirchner. TOF 5 maintained that it was clear that there had been no crime and that, therefore, there was no need to hold a trial.
Today, the Cassation chambermaids Daniel Petrone y Diego Barroetaveña They overturned that ruling.
This case seeks to determine whether the vice president received money from the Lázaro Báez and Cristóbal López as return for the businesses that both businessmen They achieved this thanks to their good relations with Kirchnerism. Báez was already convicted in the Roads case along with Cristina Kirchner, for having been favored with overpriced tenders. In the case of López, it was acquitted in the Oil Fuels process.
The judges who dismissed Cristina Kirchner in 2021 were Daniel Obligado and Adrián Grünberg. Judge Adriana Palliotti voted in dissent.
When prosecutor Gerardo Pollicita sent the case to trial, he maintained that the defendants “developed a system intended to transfer and conceal part of the profits that were in the power of the businessmen, to the former presidents themselves [en referencia a Néstor y Cristina Kirchner] and to his family nucleus, through loans, purchase of properties, rental of the different hotel complexes you own, construction of improvements in said establishments and rental of properties.”
In their appeal of the dismissal of Hotesur and Los Sauces, prosecutors Diego Velasco and Mario Villar They were very harsh when they denounced the dismissal dictated by Grümberg and Obligado. Velasco, prosecutor before the Oral Court made up of Obligado, Grünberg and Palliotti, spoke of the “institutional gravity” of the decision of the two judges who, “with a simple dogmatic analysis”, without evaluating evidence, “devastated” years of research, without the possibility of debating in court in front of society “the possible money laundering carried out by those who occupied the First Judiciary of Argentina for more than 12 years.”
Villar, prosecutor before the Cassation, for his part, when questioning the judges, said that “His only goal was to close the case” against Cristina Kirchner. He pointed out that the ruling was a “whim” that is not derived from the logic of what occurred in the process. He spoke that in the case there is an “associative structure of a stable and permanent nature, organized on the basis of a clear division of specifically defined roles and sustained uninterruptedly from at least May 8, 2003 to December 14, 2016, “which had as its objective the commission of multiple crimes that would allow the illegitimate and deliberate seizure of large sums of money from the public treasury.”
He pointed out that its members were Nestor Kirchner y Cristina Kirchner, as bosseswhile as organizers they would have taken intervention Maximus Kirchner, Julius De Vido, Jose Lopez, Carlos Santiago Kirchner, William Periotti, Alberto Sancho, Lazarus Baez, Osvaldo Sanfelice, Victor Manzanares, Cristóbal Lopez and Fabian de Sousa. They would also integrate this association, this time as members, Florencia Kirchner, Romina Mercado (daughter of Alicia Kirchner), Martín Báez, Emilio Carlos Martín, Jorge Marcelo Ludueña and Ricardo Leandro Albornoz.
He stated that, in the first stage, the criminal organization designed a “careful corporate, accounting and legal engineering that would be used to steal public funds from the National State and, subsequently, seize them through different money laundering mechanisms”.
“In a second stage, the association would have developed a system aimed at transferring and concealing the illicit origin of part of the profits obtained from the businessmen Báez, López and De Sousa to the assets of the Kirchner family, through a series of loans, purchase of properties, rentals of different hotel complexes owned by the latter, the construction of improvements in said establishments and the rental of family properties,” the prosecutor wrote. This last part is what is being investigated in the Hotesur and Los Sauces case.
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THE NATION
