The Argentine vice president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, last March.AGUSTIN MARCARIAN (Reuters)
The judicial problems of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner are postponed until at least August.
The Financial Information Unit (UIF) requested on Monday the acquittal of the former Argentine president in the Vialidad case, considering that the crimes of alleged fraud and illicit association imputed to her have not been proven.
The FIU, the anti-money laundering agency that depends on the Argentine Executive, maintained that the responsibility for the irregularities detected in the public works of the province of Santa Cruz fall only on senior provincial officials, against whom they requested sentences of one year in prison. .
"The criminal hypotheses for which they were brought up for debate were not proven," said FIU attorney Alejandro Irachet on the first day of the trial's arguments, also exonerating, among others, former Federal Planning Minister Julio de Vido, the former Secretary of Public Works José López and the businessman Lázaro Báez, the main beneficiary of public works awards in Santa Cruz during the twelve years of Kirchnerism (2003-2015).
For Irachet, the accusations against them are "non-justiciable political acts."
According to the FIU, the only proven crime in the case is the breach of the duties of public officials of various provincial officials who did not control the works awarded to the Báez company, Austral Construcciones.
The organization's lawyers also warned that the crimes they are accused of may have prescribed.
The FIU had three days to present its arguments before the Federal Oral Court 2, but it summarized its position in less than three hours in a public hearing held by videoconference.
The current vice president was connected from her office in the Argentine Senate.
The decision of the FIU to leave her out of the accusation joins that of the Anti-Corruption Office, which was a plaintiff in the case until last month, when she decided to resign.
Only the allegation of federal prosecutor Diego Luciani remains to be known.
The lawyer keeps her strategy confidential in the only ongoing trial against Fernández de Kirchner for alleged corruption and it is unknown whether he will request prison sentences against her or not.
In a brief intervention, this Monday the prosecutor limited himself to anticipating that he will make use of the nine days authorized for his plea and for that reason he asked to postpone it until August 1, when the judicial course resumes after the two weeks of winter recess to The end of this month.
Fernández de Kirchner is accused of leading an alleged illicit association that benefited Báez with million-dollar contracts that allowed him to get rich in a very short time thanks to a system of overpricing.
According to the accusation, former President Néstor Kirchner, first, and then when she succeeded him in office, placed in decisive positions people who participated in this corruption maneuver both in the award and in the execution of the works.
Nearly fifty tenders carried out in the province of Santa Cruz, the birthplace of the Kirchners, are under suspicion.
Báez was sentenced last year to 12 years in prison for laundering 55 million dollars between 2003 and 2015, the highest sentence imposed for this crime in Argentina.
The court also imposed a record fine of $480 million.
Fernández de Kirchner was also charged in the Hotesur and Los Sauces cases, in which an alleged strategy by Báez was investigated to return to the Kirchners part of the money that they would have received fraudulently.
The vice president was dismissed in both cases, but the ruling is under review by the Cassation Chamber.
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