MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

CFK's defense argues prosecutors committed malpractice

Beraldi also argued that the health of CFK's daughter Florencia Kirchner had been damaged by all the judiciary implications

Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK)'s legal team Monday argued that “the prosecution committed malpractice” in the corruption case against the former head of state (2008-2015).

Attorneys Carlos Beraldi and Ary Llernovoy will continue delivering their closing arguments Tuesday and Friday, after which they will request their client's acquittal. CFK is expected to speak Friday.

After three years on trial, Beraldi argued that “it was demonstrated” that the accusation was “false and groundless.”

“We did not give up at any time,” Beraldi added. “The truth always triumphs and that is what happened in this trial” because “it was demonstrated” that the accusation “lacked plausibility” and was “false and without grounds,” he went on in his virtual appearance before Judges Jorge Gorini, Andres Basso and Rodrigo Gimenez Uriburu. He then insisted that the prosecution had incurred “malpractice” by trying to sustain a “fantasy” linked to the fact that during Kirchnerism “a Budget was made for [businessman] Lázaro Báez to win [a tender].”

Beraldi said CFK's defense always tried “to demonstrate with all the legal instruments that exist that the charges were false and to wait for the moment when the evidence collected in a trial would prove exactly what we have asserted.”

He also pointed out that the Vice-President had been summoned “in the same day to give eight statements” and recalled that on one occasion he had been sidelined from a police search, which, when done to the defense attorney by a “direct order of the magistrate” involved scraps “all the guarantees directly related to the inviolability of the home and the right to defense.”

Beraldi also argued that the health of CFK's daughter Florencia Kirchner had been damaged by all the judiciary implications against someone who “as we all know, never developed any political activity.”

“We heard unusual things that are later repeated in the media, such as the fact that the evidence that the prosecution has is convincing and is related to the weight of the three tons,” Beraldo also said before recalling President Alberto Fernández's testimony noting that the allocation of funds for public works is the power hinged on Congress through the Budget, not the Executive.

Beraldi and Llernovoy also argued that the charges against CFK had already been heard in a Santa Cruz provincial court because they belonged in that jurisdiction.

Prosecutors Diego Luciani and Sergio Mola had requested CFK be sentenced to 12 years in prison and disenfranchised for life from holding public office, as the alleged “head” of an illicit association.