Ocnus.Net
News Before It's News
About us | Ocnus? |

Front Page 
 
 Africa
 
 Analyses
 
 Business
 
 Dark Side
 
 Defence & Arms
 
 Dysfunctions
 
 Editorial
 
 International
 
 Labour
 
 Light Side
 
 Research
Search

Dysfunctions Last Updated: Oct 6, 2020 - 10:30:19 AM


Court confirms corruption trail for Fernández de Kirchner, De Vido
By Buenos Aires Times 2/10/20
Oct 5, 2020 - 11:50:42 AM

Email this article
 Printer friendly page

Federal Criminal Cassation Court confirms trials of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Julio De Vido and a host of businessmen, ruling objections from vice-president's legal team

The Federal Criminal Cassation Court on Wednesday confirmed the corruption trials of Vice-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, former Federal Planning minister Julio De Vido and various businessmen, ruling the former president’s objections to be "inadmissible."

Judges Liliana Catucci, Guillermo Yacobucci and Eduardo Riggi all rejected the objections of the vice-president’s lawyer Carlos Beraldi.

Construction tycoons such as Carlos Wagner, Benito Roggio, Osvaldo De Sousa, María Rosa and Gerardo Cartellone and Ángelo Calcaterra (the cousin of ex-president Mauricio Macri) are among the indicted on 175 counts of graft between 2003 and 2015.

According to the prosecution, at least US$160 million was paid in bribes during the 2003-2007 presidency of the late Néstor Kirchner alone. Prosecutors believe Fernández de Kirchner, who served as president from 2007 to 2015, with De Vido as her planning minister, was at the centre of an illegal bribery ring.

This legal case is a spin-off from the so-called ‘cuadernos’ (“notebooks”) trial based on the routes, officials, businessmen and sums of money allegedly carried by a Federal Planning Ministry driver throughout the Kirchnerite years.

However, the core of the cuadernos case is currently being reviewed by the cassation court, in response to defence objections.

The court this week asked the judge of first instance to present the taped and/or filmed statements of the whistleblowers on whose testimony the charges are based, since they do not figure in the fiIe even though filing them is legally obligatory.

Fernández Kirchner, 67, is indicted in nine cases of presumed corruption during her two terms, with a trial in one of them already underway since last year. She insists that all the legal charges are nothing more than political persecution launched during the 2015-2019 presidency of Mauricio Macri.

The former president accuses the Juntos por el Cambio leader of working in collusion with the late federal judge Claudio Bonadio, who died of cancer last February and was trying most of the cases against the vice-president.

Federal judge Marcelo Martínez de Giorgi, who took over the case after Bonadio’s death, has expressed doubts about the investigation, primarily because of the lack of taped or filmed registers of whistle-blower statements.

He asked prosecutor Carlos Stornelli for them last Tuesday, giving him 48 hours to present them. The defence lawyers of the indicted are asking for the whole trial to be quashed due to the absence of these registers.

Federal judge María Romilda Servini de Cubría has already invalidated the statements of former Public Works secretary José López as a whistle-blower because his testimony was not taped.


Source:Ocnus.net 2020

Top of Page

Dysfunctions
Latest Headlines
Space: Shooting Blanks Over Ukraine
The contradictions holding Germany back
Mafia networks with significant impact on Western Balkans’ governance: EU agency
187 Years Later, Congress Thinks About Seating a Cherokee Delegate
All the Kremlin’s Trolls
The Putin regime’s façade begins to crack
The Przewodów Missile
The Governmental Vacuum in Lebanon
Russian Flight From the Arctic Undercuts Moscow’s Hold on the Far North
Biden’s Team Is Dangerously Messing in Bosnia’s Politics