Lucia Salinas
04/28/2021 12:59
Clarín.com
Politics
Updated 04/28/2021 12:59 PM
For at least nine federal judges, Lázaro Báez laundered $ 55 million between 2010 and 2013.
Since the investigation began, this hypothesis was confirmed in different instances, until the twelve-year sentence issued by the Federal Oral Court 4 (TOF 4) in February of this year. This week the foundations of that sentence were known. When they referred to the crime preceding laundering, justices
Néstor Costabel and Adriana Pallioti
pointed out that the money came from corruption in public works, but they also
spoke of "funds contaminated" by "the State's fraud maneuvers"
and added that there were "State corruption". All of this allowed businessman K to launder millions of dollars.
“It is considered absolutely proven that between 2010 and 2013 Lázaro Antonio Báez designed a machinery at the service of laundering the spurious funds that he held, making
use of different natural and legal persons
who, to a greater or lesser extent, made their contributions to the implementation of an unprecedented global money laundering maneuver in this country ”, indicated the members of TOF 4 when upholding the 12-year sentence they gave to Cristina Kirchner's former business partner.
The fundamentals, over 3,000 pages, dealt with an important section of the preceding crime, that is:
where Lázaro Báez obtained the money to use for money laundering
.
There were two undisputed aspects for two of the magistrates, since Gabriela López íñiguez -the third TOF judge 4- voted in dissent on that point.
On the one hand, the magistrates spoke of
tax evasion
, in reference to a plant of apocryphal invoices that represented a movement of illicit money of 568,874,868.78 pesos.
But they also understood that the other source of funds that Báez laundered were fraud generated through public works.
"Those
repeated frauds, perpetrated from within the National State,
altered the budgetary destination of these funds, and, therefore, when the payments in favor of Lázaro Antonio Báez
were made
, they
were irremediably contaminated
and thus entered his coffers" , said judges Costabel and Pallioti.
For those "repeated fraud" to which the magistrates referred, Cristina Kirchner is on trial and facing an oral trial, as head of an illicit association that defrauded the State by favoring Báez with 51 contracts for 46,000 million pesos. The irregularities -according to the accusing opinion-, were reflected in
alleged overpricing of 65%, half of the works unfinished
but whose payments were made, directing of the bids simulating price certificates, lack of controls that allowed Austral Construcciones without capacity technique, will continue to win contracts, among other points.
Costabel and Pallioti indicated that “it cannot be lost sight of the fact that through this operation
the monies taken from the National State
are predominantly represented
, that is, the material object on which
the frauds perpetrated by the former (Báez) and by the remaining members of
the National State
fell.
that illicit association
”, which includes the vice president and part of those who were in front of the Federal Planning Ministry led by Julio De Vido.
Those public monies, say the judges,
"entered the coffers of Lázaro Antonio Báez, already contaminated precisely by those frauds,"
who proceeded to "deploy the laundering or laundering maneuvers."
Both Costabel and Pallioti explained this "contamination" of the funds, which in part
refutes the main argument of Cristina Kirchner,
who always argued in the "Vialidad" case that public money cannot be laundered.
In their vote, the magistrates explained: "There is no valid reason to try to preach that the public funds in question cannot be laundered."
They pointed out that "the financial activity of the National State, destined to the collection of taxes, fees, contributions, and other resources of the social security, is presumed legal."
These public funds, "because they were obtained as a result of the legal financial activity of the National State, are not presumed to be contaminated at their origin," the judges continued. "But
the fraudulent alteration of the destination of these funds is certainly the cause that contaminates them with illegality."
That is the basic guideline that underlies the crime of fraudulent administration in the Roads case.
When advancing in the argument, they indicated that Cristina's government was responsible for the fact that "the funds in question became illegal." The financial activity of the National State is the legal cause that allows to give legitimacy to those budgeted funds, "but
the frauds - it is true - have changed (changed) that original legal cause into another undoubtedly illicit
.
"
Affirmation is key.
In this framework,
maintaining that the public funds in question, because they were of legal origin cannot be laundered, "constitutes, at the very least, a fallacy"
, since it must be the mere circumstance that "these funds have been paid by the circuit formal of the public banking institutions, does not in any way prevent sustaining this blatant contamination, since that is the way in which the State must fatally face its expenditures ”, concluded Costabel and Pallioti.
That is why they recalled that without the public works contracts that the Austral Group received, Lázaro Báez would not have had funds to launder.
“The frauds aired there (in the Vialidad case), projected in the present case as a source of the preceding illicit crimes,
are anchored in that illicit association that it devised, planned and executed
, whose other members acted for this purpose in tandem with Lázaro Antonio Báez: one more member and organizer of this criminal consortium ”.
They were more forceful when they indicated that "as has already been said on more than one occasion, the source or preponderant aspect of illicit origin of these funds
finds ample explanation in the acts of state and corporate corporate corruption aired in the Roads case
."
