Argentina’s VP Fernández guilty in $1B fraud, gets 6 years

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández was convicted and sentenced Tuesday to six years in prison and a lifetime ban from holding public office for a fraud scheme that embezzled $1 billion through public works projects during her presidency. President Alberto Fernández, who is not related to his vice president, said on Twitter that she was innocent and that her conviction is “the result of a trial in which the minimum forms of due process were not taken care of.” Prosecutors said Fernández fraudulently directed 51 public works projects to Lázaro Báez, a construction magnate and early ally of her and her husband Nestor Kirchner, who served as president in 2003-2007 and died suddenly in 2010. “Cristina always surprises,” pollster Roberto Bacman, director of Argentina’s Center for Public Opinion Studies, said of her announcement. Patricio Giusto, director of the consulting firm Diagnóstico Político, predicted Fernández will deepen her “strategy of victimization and equating herself” with Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva, the leftist politician who has just been elected president of Brazil after a court overturned his prison sentence for corruption.