The Kirchner family awaits a key decision from the federal courts: whether or not Cristina, Máximo and Florencia will sit in the dock in the case where their companies, the real estate company Los Sauces SA and the hotel firm Hotesur were investigated. One of the pieces of evidence in this latest file was the money found in Florencia Kirchner's safe deposit box: 4.6 million dollars, plus another million in a savings bank. For the investigators, it has not yet been possible to explain the origin of the money. It is the only thing that the vice president and her children could not recover, they are still under a court order.
In 2017 and for the first time, the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation intervened in one of the corruption cases involving the family of former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. In that resolution, which came out with a majority vote, the highest court validated the confiscation of the 5.6 million dollars seized by Justice in a safe deposit box and a bank savings bank of his daughter.
From that date, the Kirchner family did not insist on the return of that fortune.
A year before that ruling, federal judge Julián Ercolini had seized 4.6 million dollars detected in one of the two safe deposit boxes that intervened in Banco Galicia and another million dollars that were kept in a savings bank.
After the complaint of the deputy Margarita Stolbizer, that money became a key piece in the cause known as Hotesur, the firm that owns the Alto Calafate hotel. In that complaint it was said that the money was transferred to those boxes "from accounts of the succession by theinheritance of Néstor Kirchner and when Cristina Fernández, feared being seized in the cases that prospered in the federal courts after her departure from power on 10 of 2015 ".
What Ercolini determined is that the more than five million dollars are part of money laundering operations and operations that are not clarified. In other words, the federal justice held that the Kirchner family failed to justify the origin of that silver.
A year and a half ago, two judges of the Federal Oral Court 5 (TOF 5), Daniel Obligado and Adrián Grunberg, returned to the Kirchner family the administration of their companies, both the real estate Los Sauces SA and Hotesur. In addition, they restored the management of the properties nucleated under the Maximo and Florencia Kirchner Condominium.
However, the vice president and her children never managed to return the more than five million dollars. Before the Supreme Court they had demanded that these funds be returned, but the response was not favorable.
Judicial sources explained that the heat-sealed money remained in the Central Bank, but that later the decision was made to open "a judicial account in the National Bank to deposit the dollars."
Another clarification about the dollars under investigation is that they were not guarded, but sequestered, so their return was more complex than lifting the judicial interventions that governed the Kirchner companies.
The exact dollar amount found in two safe deposit boxes was $4,664,000, distributed in almost equal parts: $2,250,000 and $2,414,000. In addition, another million dollars was found and had the same fate, the seizure.
When Judge Ercolini ordered the opening of boxes 5783-9-9 and 5873-3-5, operational since March 3, 2015, only money was found. The amount then far exceeded the funds that "Florencia Kirchner received for her father's inheritance," judicial sources recalled.
The investigators took into account another fact when ordering the seizure, is that several of the bundles came from banks in Atlanta and New York, in the United States.
On that occasion, and through her lawyer, Carlos Beraldi, Florencia Kirchner authorized the opening of her safe and savings banks, denouncing a "media show" part of a "political and judicial persecution."
With this panorama, the federal justice maintains that it is not yet time for the Kirchners to recover the money. The decision of the Fourth Chamber of the Federal Chamber of Criminal Cassation regarding the Hotesur and Los Sauces cases is still pending. That is to say: they will ratify the dismissal without conducting the oral trial or will give the order that they sit in the dock of the accused.
In these files it was investigated if both the real estate and the hotel firm of the family were "a screen to perform laundering maneuvers."
During the investigation it was determined that the companies had no real business line and were used to simulate operations in order to launder funds of illegal origin. In the real estate Los Sauces the main tenants (representing 86% of the income) were Lázaro Báez and Cristóbal López.
Meanwhile, Hotesur was until 2013 rented by the firm Valle Mitre (owned by Báez), which received funds to pay the rent to the Kirchners month by month, from a single place: the companies of the Austral Group -also of Báez-, which in turn received money from a single client: the national government through public road works.
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