The war for Carlos Menem’s legacy: Zulemita was dismissed in a criminal case brought by Carlos Nair

Almost three years ago, on February 14, 2021, Carlos Menem He died in a room in a sanatorium in Buenos Aires, where he had been admitted due to a urinary tract infection. The former president and senator, who with his lights and shadows marked an important milestone in the history of the last part of Argentina, I was 90 years old. During the last years of his life, he visited the federal courts of Comodoro Py 2002, where he was even arrested. He was convicted, acquitted, re-convicted. His name has however reappeared these days in criminal records.

They don’t have Carlos Menem as the protagonist, but their children: that’s it Zulemita Menemthe girl who accompanied him on his world tours as first lady, has just been fired of the complaint lodged against him by his brother, Carlos Nahir, for the management of the assets of the former Head of State, according to the decree to which he subscribed Infobase.

Carlos Nahir, who was incarcerated for two and a half years, had conflicting consumption and came to participate in the Big Brother house in one of his shows, assured that his sister would have abused her father, “due to his age, illnesses that he already suffered from the pre-eminence given to him by the daily treatment they inflicted on him”. With this logic, he claimed, he would have made him sign documents that left him 33% of the inheritance, when it had to be divided by four. He also assured that he used assets for his benefit – by diverting them or hiding them.

To strengthen his position, Nahir claimed that his father was no longer in his full powers of discernment. Zulemita “controlled everything, including the movement of her father’s money and who she allowed into the house in 2018,” Nair said. He also claimed that he visits her twice a week. “Sometimes he would notice that his father was lost and had no idea how much money he had. I saw him as having gone into space,” he said. He also said his father “didn’t get his salary money.”

But Judge Yamile Susana Bernan relied on the opinion of prosecutor Ignacio Mahiques, who dismissed the charge. “The only element available in the file to affirm that Dr. Carlos Saúl Menem suffered from a condition which prevented him from managing or disposing of his property turns out to be the solitary declarations of the plaintiff, which found no support in any of the other evidence incorporated into the investigation,” the prosecutor’s notice reads.

Forensic Medical Corps reports indicate that Menem retained “the autonomy necessary to understand the meaning and scope of his actions.” But also in the case, the doctors who treated him were heard: they said that he had no “no indication that would lead them to suppose that he suffered from insanity or a handicap”.

“Menem was independent to walk. He dressed alone in the office. We always talked about a subject that fascinated him: football and the River. He was a 90-year-old man with a motor disorder who needed help but he didn’t appear to me to be mentally dependent,” said the internist who treated the former president for three years. “The lucidity was until the last minute”completed the psychiatrist who treated Menem from 2008 until his death.

The criminal trial was about the papers that Zulemita allegedly made him sign. But only the will was mentioned, which was signed by Menem in March 2018. At that time, Menem was a senator for the Justicialista Party of La Rioja. “He passed laws and presented projects, without questioning the state of his mental faculties”, supported the opinion.

“A large amount of evidence collected in the files has made it possible to exclude that, when signing the will in question, Dr. Carlos Saúl Menem suffered from a condition that prevented him from managing or disposing of his property, or that would have prevented him from acting with discernment and will”, maintained the resolution to which GlobeLiveMedia subscribed. “The only element available in the file to affirm that Dr. Carlos Saúl Menem suffered from a condition which prevented him from managing or disposing of his property turn out to be the plaintiff’s solitary statements, which found no support in any of the other evidence incorporated into the investigation,” it said. “We can conclude that the will was the product of a free and voluntary decision on his part, which is why I ordered the dismissal of the defendant.”was added.

The judgment indicates that, faced with the prosecutor’s request for dismissal, the judge is solely responsible for carrying out “the control of legality and reasonableness”. “The plaintiff himself did not know whether the defendant was actually administering his father’s estate and, if so, whether he had actually misappropriated any of it for his own benefit, thus affecting the rights of the other heirs,” says decision.

For the judge, everything reveals that “by his complaint what Nahir Menem wants is that in this case measures be adopted in order to reconstitute the composition of his father’s patrimony in the last years of his life and if your sister has done anything that could affect your inheritance rights. Question which, of course, does not compete until the criminal justice but in any case the civil court which is dealing with the correspondent succession process. This battle is still open.

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