Almost ten years after the scandal that brought the prodigal young
Leonardo Fariña and Federico Elaskar to fame broke out on the channel 13 screen,
the Federal Chamber of Criminal Cassation has just
confirmed the sentences
against them and their boss, the state contractor
Lázaro Báez,
in the cause that took the name of that program conducted by
Jorge Lanata and Nicolás Wiñazki:
the Money Route K.
Although then and now the evidence against all those convicted was
overwhelming,
the review of the harsh sentence that the Federal Oral Court 4 had signed in February 2021 was very harshly discussed by the judges of room IV of the Federal Cassation, who delayed its resolution until this Tuesday.
These fissures are noted in the ruling, which in almost a thousand pages includes
contradictions, inconsistencies and surprising twists.
Among the most expected, of course, is the confirmation of the sentence against Lázaro Báez, his lawyer, his accountant and the other passers-by in
La Rosadita
, immortalized in the video that the whole country saw on television, where several of them had more than five million dollars between whiskeys and cigars.
With a
slow but very detailed instruction from Judge Sebastián Casanello at first,
it was established that in less than three years Báez -freed from the control of his boss
Néstor Kirchner
, who recently died- sought all possible ways to launder the millions of dollars that were accumulating in their company accounts.
With the help of those famous young financiers and their assistants Jorge Chueco and Daniel Pérez Gadín,
some 55 million ended up in poorly masked Swiss accounts
under the Helvetic Service Group franchise, after passing through various Caribbean tax havens and giving other accounting capers.
But there was the money, in accounts
whose beneficiaries were Lázaro's four children
, some of whom were also shareholders and directors of Grupo Austral firms.
The TOF 4 added two plus two and condemned them all.
That sentence is the one that the chambermaids Angela Ledesma, Mariano Borinsky and Javier Carbajo
have now reviewed
.
And under his signature the surprises began.
The first and largest is
the disassociation of corruption in public works
as a predicate crime for laundering, that is, the origin of the money that ended up in Switzerland, for example.
Let us remember: neither Báez was a businessman before taking control of Austral Construcciones and after all its competitors in Patagonia, nor did those firms
have any other client than the national State
led by the contractor's partners, Néstor and Cristina Kirchner.
More clearly:
there was not a penny in the pockets of Lázaro Báez that did not come from the public works contracts
that they gave him repeatedly.
What was a fairly probable hypothesis at the time Casanello was investigating the money laundering is now
a certainty certified by the conviction
of the Federal Oral Court 2 in the
Highway
case , which ended in December with a six-year prison sentence for Cristina and Lázaro Báez for having defrauded the State with those 51 contracts for 46,000 million pesos, riddled with irregularities, overpricing and a key fact:
more than half were never completed or not even started.
Of course,
Báez continued to charge them regularly
, or rather with an unprecedented
fast track
for any state provider in the two hundred years of Argentine history.
If the money entered Austral's coffers but was not invested in asphalt, where did it end up?
In Switzerland, to continue with the didactic example.
Also in the
more than 900 cars
and vehicles belonging to Báez, in his
thousands of hectares of Patagonian farms,
and even in incunabula found in raids on his properties, ideal for turning dirty money into "legal" objects.
The intellectual effort not to attribute the money laundered by Lázaro to the corruption that co-starred with the Kirchner family is enormous.
And in legal terms much more, after having heard in August
the devastating argument of the prosecutors Diego Luciani and Sergio Mola
in their accusation for Highway.
Judge Ledesma wrote that this connection was not entirely clear and that the TOF 4 had
a "lack of substantiation"
in this regard in its sentence, and her colleague
Borinsky directly refused to seek a prior offense
.
Both were satisfied with attributing this crime to
tax evasion
that Báez tried to hide by hiring a trout invoice factory in Bahía Blanca, to justify expenses that he, of course, did not make.
A detail: several of those fictitious expenses were inputs... for the public works that he did not do.
The second surprise of the Federal Cassation ruling is the
acquittal of Melina and Luciana Báez,
daughters of Lázaro, for the novel application of the
gender perspective in a corruption case.
Let's clarify: Argentine justice ignored the inequalities to which women were subjected for decades, and in fact, instead of putting an end to them, it enshrined them in many files.
But crimes against public administration and money laundering do not distinguish the sexual identity of their perpetrators.
Melina and Luciana were not collaborators with their father as their brothers were.
That was clear at trial, and also in their sentences.
But both were beneficiaries of the famous Swiss accounts, in addition to the fact that at different times they had positions and responsibilities in family businesses.
Is it fair to eliminate -not attenuate or diminish, according to the evidence collected- all guilt because your father behaved with "stereotyped parameters of what is usually attributed to women", as understood by Ledesma and Borinsky?
Rather, the pirouette seems like a first milestone strategically planted to receive the tread of
the real beneficiary of that theory: Florencia Kirchner
, also accused of money laundering in the Hotesur and Los Sauces cases, whose oral trial was scandalously canceled and could be reopened in the upcoming weeks.
look also
The Federal Chamber of Cassation confirmed the conviction of Lázaro Báez in the K Money Route
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The acquittal of the daughters of Lázaro Báez: a precedent that could benefit Florencia Kirchner