Lucia Salinas
10/29/2020 12:11
Clarín.com
Politics
Updated 10/29/2020 12:12 PM
Between the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019, Judge Julián Ercolini sent Cristina, Máximo and Florencia Kirchner to oral proceedings for the crime of money laundering.
The maneuver, the accusation argued, was replicated in two structures: on the one hand,
simulating real estate rental through Los Sauces SA
, and on the other, the same methodology but with hotel facilities with the Hotesur firm.
The justice concluded that between 2009 and 2015 about 120 million pesos were laundered.
The cases, unified, are in the Federal Oral Court 5 (TOF 5), where they estimate that
the oral debate cannot begin until between the end of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022.
By then the midterm elections will have passed.
The offering of evidence is a step prior to setting the final starting date for the trial.
This stage concluded in Los Sauces last year.
But during 2020,
the judges ordered an examination of Hotesur SA at the request of Cristina Kirchner
, Lázaro Báez and other defendants.
That work has not started yet, since as a result of the quarantine by Covid 19 the tasks were suspended until the Court - at the request of the prosecutor Diego Velasco - ordered that the work be resumed online.
But as
Clarín
learned
,
the work did not begin
since "they are still digitizing all the documentation."
Until that expert report that will analyze the contracts signed between Lázaro Báez -who managed the Kirchner hotels until 2013- and Hotesur is not finished, neither can the trial offering stage be concluded.
The case of Los Sauces, indicated sources in the case, "is much more advanced," they told
Clarín
.
In court they estimate that the entire test will not be completed until the middle of next year.
It was only then that the Court made up of judges Daniel Obligado, Adriana Palliotti and Adrián Grünberg would
have to decide which witnesses it would accept
at the oral hearings.
Prosecutor Velasco had suggested
more than a hundred people
to come to the stand.
At this rate, they calculate that at the earliest the trial can begin between the last third of next year and the first quarter of 2022, that is,
when the midterm elections have already passed.
In these two cases, family businesses were investigated.
On the one hand, at Hotesur - a firm dedicated to the hotel business - business with Lázaro Báez, who is responsible for managing three hotels belonging to the Kirchner family, was analyzed.
In the case of Los Sauces, a money laundering structure was proposed through the simulation of property rentals managed by that family real estate company.
The crime would have been committed with the same modus operandi: the governments of Cristina and Néstor Kirchner
benefited businessmen K with public businesses and they allegedly made them improper returns
and millionaires through housing rentals (Los Sauces) or hiring rooms of hotels (Hotesur).
Los Sauces and Hotesur were investigated for the contracts essentially signed with businessmen K Lázaro Báez and Cristóbal López.
In the case of the real estate, operations were estimated above 30 million pesos, and with the hotel company the justice believes that about 80 million pesos were laundered.
In the accusation, the prosecutor Gerardo Pollicita remarked: "from the logic of the criminal indictment, both companies, Hotesur and Sauces, were acquired with the same purpose: to channel and recycle funds with the appearance of legality."
Likewise,
these two files were linked to fraud in public works in favor of Lázaro Báez
.
The Buenos Aires Federal Chamber indicated that corruption in said file is the precedent crime of the investigations for money laundering, that is, that a portion of the money that businessman K received from the State was derived from the rents of the companies of the Kirchners and finally, the patrimony of the former Presidents.
