Cassation will not define Cristina Kirchner’s sentence in 2023

The idea that the failure of Cristina Kirchner can stand firm for the next elections and thus banishing the vice-president is nothing just by looking at the procedural delays. It is that the Oral Federal Court 2, which made public last week the grounds for the six-year prison sentence for CFK for irregularities in the public works delivered to the businessman Lázaro Báez in Santa Cruz, has agreed to extend the deadline to 30 working days .. that the defenses and the accusers appeal their decision.

As a general rule, the appeal period is 10 working days. But the official defense of José López, former public works secretary of Kirchnerisme, and that of the former head of the national roads administration, Nelson Periotti, have asked for an extension. The courts may allow an extension of ten additional days. But in this case, lawyer Federico Paruolo, from Periotti, claimed three months, the same time the court took to write the sentence. The judges agreed, for the only time, to extend the deadline to 30 working days. The decision was made last Friday. The prosecution is also considering appealing. He wants the condemnation of those who have been acquitted.

Thus, the cause will not be able to reach the first floor of Comodoro Py 2002 until the end of April. And when he lands on this floor, the defense of the vice-president will challenge the judges of chamber IV of cassation. Mariano Borinsky, Gustavo Hornos and Javier Carbajo.

The lawyer Carlos Alberto Beraldi, legal representative of the vice-president, is already preparing the appeal. He himself confirmed that they would reject the participation of the judges who make up Chamber IV of cassation. In advance, she argues that the case should be re-examined by Chamber I of this criminal court.

Chamber I is precisely the one that contains two other key definitions for Cristina Kirchner: the decision to send the Memorandum and Hotesur-Los Sauces cases to trial. Two oral courts decided that there was no crime in either of these two cases when the evidence to advance the case was pending. They did so through proposals that targeted two cassation judges such as Hornos and Borinsky for their visits to then-President Mauricio Macri at Quinta de Olivos or Government House.

CFK’s defense will reissue these questions. For Carbajo, meanwhile, the recusal argument was based on a decision he signed just days ago. On February 28, the magistrate argued in the case that convicted businessman Lázaro Báez and his family that the $55 million laundered by the Austral Construcciones emporium came from the public works he had received under the Kirchner administration. For the defense of CFK, Carbajo has already prejudged.

The recusal process cannot be delayed, but it must be motivated. From there, there are the “ex officio conditions” which take you to any case, where the file is available to the court. And after the analysis made by the court itself, the summons to the hearings is fixed to listen to the parties and only then the court is able to decide.

There is no exact clock for how long a cassation case lasts. There are cases that can wait five years for resolution, others that can be resolved more quickly. It all depends on the complexity and the problem to be solved.

If we take as an example the case of the k-money road, which was substantiated by the same court -with a different composition because in place of Judge Hornos, Judge Angela Ledesma participated, one could imagine what could happen with the road affair: complexity of the investigation, numerous defendants, same court, file with political significance.

In the Money Lane case, the verdict of the Oral Federal Court 4 was delivered in February 2021. After appeal, the case did not reach the first floor of the Retiro Court until August. At the end of 2021, the judges convened hearings for May 2022. This decision fixed the composition of the judges who would decide. There were five months of hearings where the magistrates listened to each of the people involved. In October 2022, the judges began to reflect on their decision. It just arrived on February 28, 2023. That is. Two years passed between the verdict and the resolution of cassation. And that the judicial sources who were in charge of the resolution stressed that they had acted “at full steam”. There are causes that wait much longer for definitions.

With this photo you can imagine the time of the court case of Cristina Kirchner and the rest of the defendants in cassation. “With a lot of problems, no resolution could come out until December 2023,” they said GlobeLiveMedia the sources consulted. In December 2023, he will assume the future presidential leadership.

But also the decision of cassation, whatever it is, will not be the last. The parties have the Supreme Court of Justice to appeal. The last word is on the fourth floor of the Palacio de Tribunales. Until there is a ruling from the highest court in the land, the ruling will not be final. Nor does the perpetual disqualification entailed by the offense of fraudulent administration.

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