The Court that tried and sentenced Vice President Cristina Fernández and other defendants in the so-called “Road case” will announce the grounds of its verdict this Thursday morning and the stage will be opened to present appeals before the Federal Chamber of Cassation.
The Federal Oral Court (TOF) number 2 will notify the parties of the grounds of its sentence, in a process that will not be face-to-facebut that the writing will be incorporated into the computerized legal case, judicial sources explained.
From that moment, the period of ten business days will open to appeal the verdict before Cassation, the highest federal criminal court in the country.
The review instance determines that the verdict is not fulfilled until it is final and that instance could be before the Supreme Court of Justice, which does not have deadlines to resolve.
After announcing their decision at the end of an oral trial on December 6, judges Jorge Gorini, Rodrigo Giménez Uriburu and Andrés Basso distributed a brief report with a summary of the reasons for which they sentenced six years in prison to the vice president and sentences were set for other defendants.
But as established by law, they will now disseminate the complete grounds, with a well-founded explanation of their decision, based on which the parties have already anticipated that they will appeal before Cassation.
But from those first guidelines all the parties began to prepare their appeals.
On the side of federal prosecutors Diego Luciani and Sergio Mola, they are expected to question the acquittals for the crime of illicit association, which resulted in a noticeable reduction in sentences.
Both had claimed 12 years in prison for the Vice President, who was sentenced to six years and perpetual disqualification from holding public office for the other crime that was considered proven; that of fraudulent administration.
In addition, the members of the Public Ministry will go to Cassation against the three resolved acquittals, including that of the former Federal Planning Minister Julio De Vido.
The defenses will appeal
For their part, the defenses will appeal and ask to revoke the convictions for fraud and confirm the acquittals for illicit association, in line with the arguments they put forward in their final arguments last year.
In the trial, the former president sat on the bench for the first time, accused of benefiting the businessman Lázaro Báez with 80 percent of the national public works awarded in Santa Cruz between 2003 and 2015.
Shortly after the verdict was read, the head of the Senate and two-time president said that her conviction is part of a process that is no longer “lawfare or the Judicial Party” but “a parallel State and judicial mafia.”
Both the defense of the vice president and that of other convicts would also have the possibility of resorting to international courts, in particular the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IDH Court), whose decisions are mandatory for the Argentine Justice.
In that aspectFernández de Kirchner’s defense denounced violation of constitutional guarantees, persecution and “lawfare” by the Judiciary.
In anticipation of the grounds made known to public opinion due to the institutional importance attached to the trial, the judges argued that “an extraordinary fraudulent maneuver was proven that harmed the pecuniary interests of the national public administration.”
As for the Vice President, they opined that she had “a manifest interest in the criminal plan” embodied in the processing of 51 public road works tenders on national and provincial routes in Santa Cruz.
Days before, when making use of his “last words” before the court, Fernández de Kirchner had reiterated what he had argued from the beginning of the process: that the sentence he would receive “is already written” by the “judicial party.”
In Cassation, the sentence will be reviewed by room IV, currently made up of judges Mariano Borinsky, Gustavo Hornos and Javier Carbajo, because they have already intervened in other instances of the Road case.
The three judges, as they proceed in these cases, will call the parties to one or more preliminary hearings and there they will hear the grounds.
Subsequentlythey will have 20 business days to resolve, although this term is usually lax, as was also seen last year with the Hotesur-Los Sauces cases and the signing of the Memorandum with Iran, both closed with dismissals without oral trial due to the absence of a crime and a study by another Court of Appeal, the first.
In both cases, the hearings were held at the end of 2022 and there has not yet been a sentence.
Once Cassation renders a sentence, the Supreme Court of Justice could enter the scene, although without time limits of any kind to decide.
The judges sentenced the vice president to six years in prison and perpetual special disqualification from holding public office as “a criminally responsible author of the crime of fraudulent administration to the detriment of public administration.”
Lázaro Báez, owner of the company “Austral Construcciones”, received the same sentence for the same crime as a necessary participant.
Also sentenced to six years in prison were the former head of the National Highway Administration in that period, Nelson Periotti, and the former Secretary of Public Works, José López.
Former officials of the national highway and the province of Santa Cruz received sentences of between 4 and 5 years in prison, while all the defendants were acquitted for the crime of illicit association.
The Court ordered the updated confiscation if the sentence is final of 84,835,277,378.04 million pesos, amount considered product of the crime.
