Argentine Justice has once again given relief to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Chamber III of the Federal Civil and Commercial Court has ruled that the former president will not have to pay the 22.3 billion pesos (49,163,000 USD) claimed by the National Road Directorate (DNV) in the civil lawsuit stemming from the Vialidad case, the corruption file for which she has already been sentenced to prison.
The decision was based on a technical argument: the expiration of the proceedings due to Vialidad's inactivity for more than six months. According to the judges, the agency abandoned the file between March 18, 2023 and April 7, 2025, which allowed Kirchner's defense to request the dismissal of the lawsuit.
The origin of the multimillion-dollar claim
The civil action was initiated on January 25, 2018, during the presidency of Mauricio Macri, with the aim of recovering the funds diverted in the awarding of public works in Santa Cruz, the epicenter of the Kirchnerist corruption scheme. The trial judge, Marcelo Bruno dos Santos, had already closed the proceedings in April of this year, noting that Vialidad had let the deadlines expire. That ruling was appealed by the agency, now under the direction of Marcelo Jorge Campoy, but without success.
The DNV defended its actions alleging that it had indeed moved the file forward. In its appeal, it argued that in September 2023 it replied to a notification from Carlos Kirchner, who had been acquitted in the criminal phase and requested to be excluded from the civil lawsuit. It even added as a precedent the request on September 15, 2023 to borrow the file and digitize documents. According to the state defense, only 6 business days (or 12, if the digitization process was counted) had elapsed from that date until the suspension of the case.
