Argentine socialist Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner once again faced charges of extreme corruption this week, the Argentine news site Infobae reported on Monday, citing accusations by prosecutor Diego Luciani that Fernández engaged in an “extraordinary” level of corruption during her presidency from 2007 to 2015.
Luciani delivered the initial closing arguments in Kirchner’s corruption trial to a court in Buenos Aires on August 1. He accused the socialist politician — along with her late husband Nestor Kirchner, who served as Argentina’s president from 2003 to 2007 — of “a pyramidal illicit association.”
“Between 2003 and 2015, an illicit association with unique characteristics operated within the state,” Luciani said.
“When Nestor Kirchner took over the presidency of the nation, and later his wife […] they installed and maintained within the national and provincial administration of Santa Cruz, one of the most extraordinary corruption matrices that unfortunately and sadly has ever existed in the country,” he stated.
Fernández de Kirchner is currently on trial for alleged fraud. State prosecutors have accused the vice president of granting public works contracts for the Argentine province of Santa Cruz to a businessman friend of hers named Lazaro Baez. Prosecutors accuse Baez of overcharging for the relevant public works projects, most of which they say were never completed.
Fernández’s corruption trial, for which Luciani delivered the prosecution’s initial closing arguments on August 1, is just one of at least five trials she is currently involved in.
“Kirchner, 69, is the target of about a dozen investigations for crimes including bribe-taking, money laundering and obstruction of justice,” Agence France-Presse observed on Monday.
“The prosecution will present its closing arguments over nine sessions programmed for the coming three weeks, after which it will be the turn of the defense,” the news agency noted of Fernández’s corruption trial.
The trial started in May 2019 but was suspended in 2020 due to the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. Fernández faces disqualification from participating in Argentine politics if she is convicted of fraud.
Luciani’s accusations recalled similarly incendiary allegations that arose nearly a decade ago against Fernández de Kirchner raised by another prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, who claimed to have compiled evidence that Fernández de Kirchner had cut a deal with the government of Iran to exonerate it for its role in the 1994 bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA). The AMIA bombing was the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the Western Hemisphere prior to September 11, 2001.
Alberto Nisman, the prosecutor investigating the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center, talks to journalists in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Wednesday, May 29, 2013. The terrorist attack was the worst on Argentine soil, killing 85 people, injuring over 200. Nisman accused Iran on Wednesday of infiltrating South American countries and installing a network that aims to carry out terrorist attacks in the region. (Natacha Pisarenko/AP)
Nisman was found shot dead in January 2015 the day before he was scheduled to present his findings against Fernández de Kirchner to the Argentine Congress. Investigators found a draft arrest warrant for her in his trash.
People hold candles during a vigil on the first anniversary of Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman’s mysterious death in Buenos Aires, on January 18, 2016. The prosecutor died in mysterious circumstances in January 18, 2015, after accusing Argentina’s then president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, of obstructing his investigation of a 1994 bombing at a Buenos Aires Jewish center. (EITAN ABRAMOVICH/AFP/Getty Images)
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