Kirchner’s ‘suitcases of buried cash’ trigger gold fever

As Argentina hosts the G20 summit this week it is in the grip of a drama as compelling as any of its soap operas.

Former Argentine president Cristina Kirchner in Buenos Aires earlier this month. Picture: AFP

As Argentina hosts the G20 summit this week it is in the grip of a drama as compelling as any of its soap operas. A suitable title might be The Gold Rush.

Fortune-hunters are heading to Patagonia to look for suitcases of cash believed to be buried in the desert by the former president and her friends.

Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, president from 2007 to 2015, has been charged and dozens of others have been arrested and jailed for taking bribes, thought to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, for public works contracts.

Some of the money — wads of euros and dollars — was laundered but investigators are convinced that a large chunk was hidden in Patagonia, where Kirchner has a home.

One popular theory is that some was buried in the mausoleum housing Kirchner’s husband, Nestor, in his windswept Patagonian home town. He was president from 2003 to 2007 and died in 2010.

Investigators used bulldozers to search for the missing loot, but in vain. Now private fortune-hunters are trying their luck in an outbreak of what a newspaper described as “gold fever”. One couple with links to the Kirchners in Patagonia were kept tied up in their ranch for two days by hooded gunmen searching for cash-filled suitcases.

“It’s like some bad comedy film,” said Federico Pinedo, a conservative senator, recalling how a former public works official, Jose Lopez — one of those accused — was seen throwing bags of cash over the walls of a convent and handing two of the bags, containing $US9m ($12.44m) and an assault rifle, to an elderly nun.

Guillermo Marijuan, a prosecutor, said he had been using satellite photography to seek possible burial sites for the money. But he feared that agents loyal to Kirchner were feeding his team false leads as well as tipping off her helpers whenever the investigators drew near.

“We’ve done a lot of digging,” he said. “ … when we try to arrive with an element of surprise they seem to know we’re coming.”

Among those questioned recently was Kirchner’s private secretary, who recalled a flight to El Calafate, in southern Argentina, where the former president has a home. Suitcases were carried into the house while staff had to wait outside. “No doubt they were hiding the money,” said Marijuan. But when the house was searched, nothing was found.

A judge has frozen properties worth $US250m in Patagonia, including a house carved into a mountainside, that prosecutors suspect were part of a money-laundering scheme set up by the Kirchners.

“These are houses in the middle of nowhere, with luxurious furniture and saunas,” Marijuan said. One had a football pitch with synthetic turf, floodlights, changing rooms and a podium for visitors. “They could not have amassed such a fortune on their salaries.”

The prosecutor was sceptical of claims by their daughter Florencia, 28, that $US5m traced to a security box in her name was payment for legal work.

Florencia is accused of money laundering along with her mother and brother, Maximo.

The investigation had already claimed several scalps before it was given new impetus by a bombshell revelation in August. La Nacion, a daily newspaper, reported that for 10 years a ministerial chauffeur had kept notebooks in which he had recorded his collections and deliveries of $US53m in “black money” destined for Kirchner and her officials.

Some of those named in the notebooks had already been jailed but are co-operating in exchange for leniency — the so-called “remorseful ones”.

Kirchner, currently a senator, can be charged but not arrested while she holds public office. She has enough support in the Senate to block an attempt to strip her immunity.

Her former chief of staff, Anibal Fernandez, said the failure to find any money proved that charges against her were “lies” to prevent her from running for re-election as president next year.

“Without a body there’s no murder,” said Fernandez, a lawyer and former target of drug-trafficking investigations.

“They’re digging in the desert, they’ll dig all the way to China, but they won’t find anything.”

The Times