Argentina’s Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirhcner announced Monday her decision to recuse federal judge Julián Ercolini in a case investigating former heads of the Federal Public Revenue Administration (AFIP) during the Macri Administration, claiming that his impartiality is in doubt.
«I have instructed my lawyer to challenge Judge Ercolini in the case investigating the illegal maneuvers carried out by Alberto Abad and Leandro Cuccioli from the AFIP, during the administration of Mauricio Macri, to persecute me and my two children,» said the former president in a message on her Twitter account.
According to Fernández de Kirchner, the recusal of Ercolini is based on his «already famous trip» to Lago Escondido together with other judges, intelligence agents and executives of the Clarín Telecom media group.
Likewise, the head of the Argentine Senate has shared the document in which she requests the judge to remove former heads of the AFIP from the case, in which it is detailed that «in the framework of an internal audit carried out by the tax collection agency, it could be established that the AFIP, under the leadership of Alberto Abad and Leandro Cuccioli, plotted multiple illegal actions to persecute and harass the Kirchner family, incurring, among others, in the crimes of abuse of authority, breach of duties of a public official and illicit association», as reported by the agency Télam.
In this sense, he stressed that these crimes under investigation «do not constitute isolated episodes, but rather form part of a set of criminal actions concerted from the highest levels of the former national government».
«The panorama evidenced, before the eyes of any observer with a minimum of objectivity, denotes that Judge Julián Ercolini cannot and should not continue to be in charge of this process, since there is a severe and well-founded objective fear of partiality», the recusal states.
