Interim Argentine Attorney General Eduardo Casal sent a letter to the Supreme Court arguing that former two-term president and vice president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner should be found guilty of illegal association in the case known as “Vialidad” and sentenced to 12 years. 

The defense, on the other hand, has filed an appeal with the country’s top court asking that Kirchner be acquitted in the same case. This is the final appeal on the case, and there is no timetable for when the Supreme Court will deliver its verdict. 

Kirchner was first convicted of fraud in December 2022 and sentenced to six years in prison and a lifelong ban on holding public office. The court found that she had arranged for 51 public works contracts in Santa Cruz province to go to a company belonging to her friend Lázaro Báez. 

Argentina’s Federal Cassation Chamber upheld her conviction last November, paving the way for the case to make it to the Supreme Court.

Casal sent the justices a 13-page letter outlining his reasoning. In the note, he backed general prosecutor Mario Villar, who in February had requested the Supreme Court overturn the dismissal of illicit association charges against Kirchner. The charge was initially ruled out by the Federal Oral Court 2, the first tribunal to hear the case. This decision was later confirmed by the Federal Cassation Chamber. The 12-year sentence was the original request made by prosecutor Diego Luciani in the 2022 trial. 

“The general prosecutor explained, quite rightly, that there is no justification to resort to this artifice when what is at issue here is the fraudulent awarding of fifty-one public works contracts within a proven corruption scheme,” wrote Casal. He added that the fact that the scheme was carried out as a “single plan” was not “incompatible with the figure of illegal association, whose configuration does not depend on any execution.”

He also supported Villar’s petition to have Kirchner and the eight other people convicted for fraud be fined AR$5.32 billion (US$4.73 million at the official rate), the estimated amount at current value of the money embezzled at the time of the original sentencing. 

The attorney general also requested that the acquittal of three other people involved in the case, one of them being former Planning Minister Julio de Vido, be revoked. 

The former president has always maintained her innocence and claimed that the charges against her are politically motivated. The night before the Cassation Chamber’s verdict last December, she posted a statement online accusing the judges of conflicts of interest and alignment with her political opponents.