The Argentine justice condemns an iconic Kirchner businessman for money laundering

Argentine businessman Lázaro Báez in court in October 2018.Carlota Ciudad / EFE

Lázaro Báez will have to spend 12 years in prison.

The Argentine justice found him guilty of laundering assets for 60 million dollars between 2010 and 2013, when his name was among the state contractors preferred by Kirchnerism.

At that time, Báez was the owner of Austral Construcción, a company based in Santa Cruz, the province that was a political bastion of Krichnerism, which made him a millionaire thanks to juicy state contracts that are now under judicial scrutiny.

The ruling against the businessman, which also affected his four children, is close to the former president and now vice president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, investigated in a parallel case for allegedly benefiting Báez with millionaire contracts in exchange for bribes.

The judges had no mercy on Baez.

In addition to jail, they seized $ 60 million of his estate and ordered him to pay a fine of $ 480 million, a sum that exceeds his personal fortune.

The businessman was an icon of the so-called "K entrepreneurs", characters close to power who became rich overnight thanks to public works contracts.

The courts considered it proven that Báez sent black money from corruption to opaque accounts in tax havens, which later re-entered the country in the form of Argentine Treasury bonds in Austral Construcciones' accounts.

The path of that black money became known in Argentina as “the route of K money”, and soon the name of Báez was synonymous with corruption in public opinion.

As the crime of money laundering requires a pre-existing crime, the ruling should concern Cristina Kirchner, who is being investigated in another case for allegedly benefiting Báez with the road works that enriched him.

Báez was a Banco Provincia cashier when he met former president Néstor Kirchner, then mayor of Río Gallegos, the capital of the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz.

And he pointed to its wake.

Since his friend became governor, and later president, the bank clerk began an upward career that allowed him to sign up to $ 800 million in public contracts in 10 years.

With that money he bought 263,000 hectares of fields, until he became a large landowner.

And it acquired almost all the public works companies in that area of ​​Patagonia until it took over the majority of the market.

Báez became very wealthy and built a spectacular mansion on the outskirts of Río Gallegos, a coastal city located 2,500 kilometers south of Buenos Aires.

The judicial investigations against him began during Kirchnerism, but at a slow pace.

With the arrival of Mauricio Macri to the presidency they took a dizzying speed.

The macrismo saw in Báez a way to reach Cristina Kirchner, although the former president never appeared in the file.

The arrival of Alberto Fernández and Cristina Kirchner to the Casa Rosada did not stop the process.

If the ruling took longer than expected, it was due to the pandemic, which forced the sessions to be followed virtually.

Báez has finally been convicted, thus closing a circle that has few precedents in Argentina, where money laundering crimes often go unpunished.