Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández lashed out on Tuesday against the prosecutors who asked for a 12-year prison sentence by stating that they have not proven “anything they said” during the trial in which they accuse her of corruption.
Fernández said in a presentation broadcast from his office in the Senate that the accusations against him “are the opposite of what they said and we saw it from witnesses cited” by the prosecutors themselves in a trial he described as “fiction.”
Diego Luciani, one of the official accusers of the trial of the vice president, requested the day before a sentence of 12 years in prison and his disqualification from holding public office after accusing her of irregularly awarding during his term (2007-2015) some 51 works to the businessman Lázaro Báez and thereby defrauding the State of some 1,000 million dollars.
The vice president said that the trial is based “on a script that is quite bad as well as false” and questioned the “construction of surcharges, unmade routes, non-existent routes” mentioned by the prosecutors to support their request for conviction.
Fernández arrived at Congress with the support of hundreds of protesters who greeted her with slogans.
Asking for the sentence for the former president and her disqualification from holding public office, Luciani said that “we are facing the greatest corruption maneuver that has been known in the country.”
The president defended herself from the accusations from her office in the upper house, which she presides over, after the court that has been judging her for three years rejected the possibility of expanding her defense the day before.
The former president denies the charges and said that the court has already “written and even signed” the sentence against her.
This is the first request for conviction against the former president in the dozen legal cases for various crimes to which she has been the subject, some of which were closed and others remain under investigation.
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