After knowing the grounds of the federal prosecutor before the Chamber of Cassation, mario villarbased on which he requested that Cristina, Máximo and Florencia Kirchner -along with the other defendants-, face the oral trial for money laundering in the Hotesur and Los Sauces unified files, lThe vice president requested that the dismissal be confirmed and that the case be permanently annulled.
Cristina Kirchner He does not want to face another oral trial, much less with his children Máximo and Florencia. Under the premise that they never used their companies Hotesur (family hotel firm) and Los Sauces (real estate) to launder assets, he insisted that the case be closed.
Before Chamber I of the Chamber of Cassation, made up of judges Daniel Petrone, Ana Maria Figueroa and Diego Barrotaveña, lawyer Carlos Beraldi requested that the controversial dismissal that with the vote of two judges dictated the Federal Oral Court 5 without conducting the oral trialstand firm.
“We come to expand the solid legal foundations exposed in the resolution in crisis”, begins the letter to which he agreed Clarion.
Thus, the defense of the vice president and her children insisted on the dismissal that the judge had voted Daniel Forced and his colleague Adrian Grunberg. The judge Adriana Palliotti, instead, voted in dissent.
Beraldi stated that the case is based on “a series of baseless irregularities” and therefore “it is essential, once and for all, to issue a resolution that puts an end to these actions, which have been in process for several years”.
Hotesur and Los Sauces are the companies of the Kirchner family that, according to several judicial instances were used to launder 120 million pesos between 2009 and 2015. The investigation held that these firms did not have commercial purposes -quite the contrary, they were unviable- and that they were only set up for the purpose of channeling funds of illicit origin.
These two companies never had commercial headquarters. In both, a common denominator was Lazarus Baez, as a tenant in the real estate company and as the person in charge of managing and operating the hotels. The accusation linked him to the contractor as a necessary piece to “return” to the former presidents at least part of the money from the surcharges in public works that their companies won in tenders questioned in another file, now under oral trial and in which Cristina is the main accused.
Judges Obligado and Grunberg did not agree with that. His opinion was taken up by the vice president’s lawyer in the new presentation. “The objective budget of the criminal figure that is intended to be applied in the case is the existence of cash or other assets outside the legal financial circuit, which are placed in the legal markets through different maneuvers with the purpose of disguising their true origin and be able to freely dispose of them. If such a budget is not verified, it is impossible to consider a money laundering maneuver configured. It goes without saying that this is what happens here, “he said.
In short, expresses the presentation, “Who owns their assets in the legal capital market does not need to “launder” them to dispose of thembecause they can do it freely without resorting to any financial device.” Thus, the Kirchner family once again denied having carried out money laundering operations with the help of Báez.
This Monday, the prosecutor before the Cassation, Mario Villar, announced the foundations of his statement in which he took up the criteria of his colleague before TOF 5, Diego Velasco, who had already stated that the best way to settle the responsibility or guilt of the accused is in an oral trial.
In a harsh opinion, Villar pointed out that Obligado and Grunberg’s decision was “arbitrary” and as such “masks under the guise of a legal act a defenseless decision of legality”, for this reason -continued the prosecutor- “they are not sentences, they do not say the law and those who dictate them do not act as judges, but as subjective wills set aside of the legal system they should defend”.
Cristina Kirchner’s defense insisted that how money is “banked” and that therefore, there is no “money outside the legal circuit”, “nothing can be washed badly”.
The representative of the Public Ministry also referred to this concept, rejecting such a premise. “This criterion is equivalent to saying that, if someone carries out a scam, there is no money laundering if the payment of the scam was made in the bank account of the perpetrator of the crime.”
