The Argentine court dropped the charges against the country’s vice president, Cristina Kirchner, and her two children, Florencia and Máximo, in a lawsuit investigating the family for alleged money laundering, according to the decision released on Friday ( 26).
A federal court ruled that the case was unsupported to go to trial. The measure also affects the other six mentioned in the lawsuit. The decision can still be appealed.
Cristina and her family were being investigated in two scandals named “Hotesur” and “Los Sauces”, which dealt with alleged overpricing in public works tenders held in the province of Santa Cruz and the alleged payment of bribes through false reservations in hotels belonging to the Kirchner family.
In the case of Hotesur, a company with no experience in the hotel business, owned by businessman Lázaro Báez, who was the pivot of other accusations against Cristina, received bribe funds and managed Kirchner hotels, where he made false reservations to give the money an appearance of legality, according to the indictment. which was suspended this Friday.
In the case of Los Sauces, which was merged with the same Hotesur lawsuit in court, the former president and now vice president was accused of running, from 2009 to 2016, a scheme in which bribes were laundered in the form of payment of apartment rents, in a scandal that would also involve Báez.
Despite requests from the prosecution to take the case to trial, two of the three judges in the court have understood that there is no evidence to accuse Cristina of money laundering.
At 68, the country’s former president was acquitted in several cases of suspected crimes that occurred in her two presidential terms (2007-2015), but still faces five cases.
The latest of these decisions was the shelving, in October, of the process in which she was accused of covering up those responsible for the attack on the Jewish association Amia, in 1994, in Buenos Aires, with a toll of 85 dead and 300 injured.
The lawsuit against Cristina and several of her employees was filed by the late prosecutor Alberto Nisman. For him, by signing the Memorandum with Iran in 2015 to interrogate the accused outside Argentina, the then president was trying to free former Iranian authorities from accusations in exchange for commercial benefits.
The court, however, had a different interpretation of the case. “The Memorandum of Understanding with Iran, regardless of whether it was considered a political right or wrong, did not constitute a crime or an act of cover-up,” it said in its decision.
The 1994 attack was attributed to Iranian rulers, led by the country’s then president, Ali Rafsanjani. The episode, so far, has not generated convictions, and the memorandum, signed in 2013, with the approval of the Argentine Congress, has never been ratified by the Legislative in Tehran.
Nisman indicted Cristina in January 2015, when she was serving the final year of her second term as president. Days later, when he was to be questioned in Congress, he was found in his home shot to the head. The case shocked the country and raised suspicions that he was murdered.
Just as until today it is not known who attacked Amia — the greatest suspicion is on the Lebanese group Hizbullah with Iran’s support — nor the reason, nor is it known the context of Nisman’s death, whether he committed suicide or was murdered.
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