MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Argentine justice advances on 111 assets of the Kirchners and Lázaro Báez in Vialidad case

Following the Cassation ruling, all that remains for Cristina Kirchner and her children is to file a direct complaint before the Supreme Court

The Federal Criminal Cassation Chamber of Argentina on Thursday rejected the extraordinary appeals filed by former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, her children Máximo and Florencia, and businessman Lázaro Báez against the confiscation of 111 assets ordered as part of the Vialidad case. The decision, adopted by the court's Chamber IV, virtually closes the path to the country's highest tribunal and clears the execution of the asset-related measures associated with the conviction for fraudulent administration imposed on the former president in December 2022 and confirmed by the Supreme Court in June 2025.

The confiscation, amounting to 684.99 billion pesos —around USD 480 million at the current exchange rate— covers properties attributed to Fernández, her children, and Báez, the former owner of the construction group Austral Construcciones. Among the assets belonging to Máximo and Florencia Kirchner are nineteen properties received through inheritance or transfer, including ten apartments on Mitre Street 535 in Río Gallegos and five lots of the Los Sauces hotel complex in Lago Argentino, both in the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz. The six-year prison sentence Fernández is currently serving under house arrest with an electronic ankle bracelet is linked to irregularities in the awarding of national road public works in Santa Cruz during the Kirchner governments.

The decision was adopted by a majority of judges Gustavo Hornos and Diego Barroetaveña, with a partial dissent from Judge Mariano Borinsky. In his vote, Hornos held that “the confiscation of the proceeds of criminal origin finds its grounding in the fact that the crime does not constitute a legitimate title to generate legally recognized wealth,” and characterized the sentenced facts as having generated “an economic flow of extraordinary magnitude to the detriment of the public treasury.” The magistrate rejected the argument that the inheritance or gratuitous transfer of the assets neutralizes the execution, holding that these are part of “the patrimonial circuit reached by the confiscation.”

Borinsky considered the former president's appeal inadmissible, but found that the extraordinary instance should be partially enabled regarding assets acquired before 23 April 2004, the date taken by the executing court as a starting point to assess the incorporation of assets subject to confiscation. The disagreement involves the ten apartments at Mitre 535, the five lots of the Los Sauces complex, and the properties linked to two companies acquired by Báez: Kank y Costilla and Loscalzo y Del Curto.

Following the Cassation ruling, all that remains for Cristina Kirchner and her children is to file a direct complaint before the Supreme Court, a restricted procedural avenue that rarely leads to substantive review. From the sixth floor of the federal courts at Comodoro Py, seat of the Federal Oral Court 2 that issued the original conviction, the country's highest tribunal has already been consulted about the eventual disposal of the properties, in what constitutes the administrative prelude to the auctions.