After repeated requests from Cristina Kirchner, finally the prosecutor Guillermo Marijuan requested his dismissal in the case known as the K Money Route, where the vice president is accused of money laundering. It is a residual file to the one in which Lázaro Báez was sentenced to ten years in prison for having laundered 55 million dollars.
Despite the enumeration of arguments under which the prosecutor claims not to have been able to prove Cristina's participation in "this concrete and punctual money laundering maneuver," Marijuan added in his opinion an unprecedented work of the Directorate of Judicial Assistance in Complex Crimes and Organized Crime (DAJuDeCo) in which the telephone lines assigned to the vice between 2010 and 2013 and the crossing of them with the de Báez yielded a total of 372 communications in just over two years.
This residual section of the K Money Route focused on the link between Cristina Kirchner and Lázaro Báez, "to determine and establish their possible co-authorship or participation in that specific and punctual money laundering maneuver," explains the opinion to which Clarín accessed.
With the analysis of the case, said prosecutor Marijuan, "I have no doubt whatsoever about the close and direct personal relationship between" the vice president and the owner of Grupo Austral.
Baez's conviction
Lazaro Baez was convicted of laundering $55 million between 2010-2013. At the same time, he entered into several commercial deals with the former President: 18 purchase and sale of properties and land, the administration and operation of hotels, rental contracts, a condominium land, hiring of rooms for tourist complexes, construction of real estate. These are just some of the businesses that unite them. In addition, Báez and his entourage made multiple visits to the presidential residence of Olivos at that time.
The common denominator in all these businesses is Austral Construcciones, awarded 86% of the road contracts tendered in Santa Cruz, which according to the conviction in which the trial against Cristina Kirchner for the Vialidad case derived, were plagued by irregularities: direction of the contests, lack of controls, unfinished works, average price premiums of 65%, exclusive circuits to receive funds for works that did not advance, among others.
It is precisely a portion of those irregular funds that, according to the Court that convicted Lázaro Báez in the K Money Route, were turned over to laundering operations.
In this regard, prosecutor Marijuan now indicated that both Báez and the vice president were "convicted of illicit activities that have held them responsible for the crime of fraudulent administration to the detriment of the public administration."
"Endearing closeness, bond and friendship"
Then he detailed the multiple commercial businesses that link Cristina Kirchner with Báez, which show "the endearing closeness, bond and friendship" between the two, says the prosecutor.
In the development of the analysis of this link, the representative of the Public Prosecutor's Office said: "And if the above is not enough to understand it, we have that the recent evidence incorporated into this case regarding the study of the cross-referencing of calls between telephones of Lázaro Báez and Cristina Elisabet Fernández and / or their secretaries and collaborators, show that the former had at least 372 telephone contacts over a period of just over two years."
Between 2010 and 2013 Lázaro Báez – who had declared to the AFIP a net worth of 66 million pesos – increased his fortune substantially. In 2016, the Federal Justice detected 1,420 movable and immovable assets, equivalent then to 205 million dollars. There is a section of the case that investigates whether those properties were acquired in a personal capacity or acting as a front man for the Kirchners.
Before these money laundering operations that were already condemned by an Oral Court, the prosecutor Guillermo Marijuan had insisted that Cristina Kirchner, "maintained a link with her consort of cause" which allowed "to affirm her participation in the laundering actions" that earned Báez a sentence of twelve years.
When the prosecutor evaluated all the evidence in progress, he pointed out that it was necessary to promote an interchange of telephone calls, from "October 2010 to April 2013" and that this will determine the success of the measure. It is in this context that more than 370 communications were detected.
Marijuan considered that this flow of calls and messages "is not usual." Just by "imagining how difficult or almost impossible it is for any citizen to call a President of the Nation by telephone, the result of this measure shows, with that immense amount of contacts, that Lázaro Báez and Cristina Fernández were more than simple acquaintances of Santa Cruz and had a fluid contact."
The proposal belies the statements of the vice president, who denied any type of commercial link with Lázaro Báez as well as a relationship of friendship or assiduous relationship with the Patagonian businessman.
Even with the clarity of this link between Lázaro Báez and Cristina Elisabet Fernández - the prosecutor continued to say in his opinion - and "having passed more than ten years, since the beginning of this criminal process and almost five years since the investigative statement of the named in the framework of this file, I have not been able to gather evidence that leads me to move beyond the state of suspicion" regarding the participation of the vice in the laundering maneuvers.
Based on this premise, he requested before Judge Sebastián Casanello that Cristina Kirchner be dismissed. The prosecution was unable to find any direct order or intervention by the vice president for Báez to mount and specify the structure of money laundering operations.
That is why Marijuan concluded that there are no elements to accuse the vice president of "a possible order or any other type of action, whether it is coercing, participating in or instigating the illicit movement of funds taken to Switzerland."
The prosecutor also referred to the confirmation of the conviction of the K Money Route by the Federal Criminal Cassation Chamber, which rejected the premise of the trial court on the preceding crime of money laundering, which for the TOF was corruption in public road works contracts. "This erroneous decision does nothing more than focus the scene on the illicit activity headed by Lázaro Báez and the tax evasion of his assets."
When delving into this situation, Marijuan said that this patrimony "I would call it booty," and that the decision of the Cassation "leaves aside the link of money laundering with public road works and with it the political power of the day at that time."
In this regard, he added that if it is considered that "the enormous mass of money that Lázaro Báez laundered with the complex maneuver of 'exporting' millions of foreign currency re-entering the country as an investment, as well as the purchase of innumerable furniture and real estate, comes only from tax evasion and not from the irregular allocation of public works directed in his favor, It moves the center of the criminal scene away from the political power of this money laundering cause."
However, he explained that this request for dismissal "in no way moves other procedural situations in pending files. Moreover, there is evidence now collected that demonstrates a bond that goes beyond a relationship of friendship or knowledge between Lázaro Antonio Báez and Cristina Elisabet Fernández."
The prosecution's request, which must now be endorsed by Judge Casanello, does not impact the accusatory sentence against Báez and the other fifteen defendants in the K Money Route. The section involving the vice president responded to a residual case and sought to unravel her level of participation and responsibility in the laundering structure that had Austral Construcciones as its central link.
Nor is it related to the accusation of six years in prison that the vice president received in the Vialidad trial for fraudulent administration to the detriment of the State. The road tenders that Báez received while simultaneously celebrating two private businesses with the Kirchner family were analyzed there.
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