The Supreme Court of Justice rejected a presentation by Daniel Omar Blanco, one of the accused in the investigation into the assets of the late private secretary of Néstor Kirchner, Daniel Muñoz, in one of the cases linked to the mega-case known as "Notebooks". Blanco's plea — the uncle of Carolina Pochetti, Muñoz's widow and a collaborating witness in the case — was dismissed by judges Horacio Rosatti, Carlos Rosenkrantz, and Ricardo Lorenzetti, who determined that the document did not meet the formalities required by agreement 4/2007, so the complaint will not proceed. As anticipated by the Argentine News Agency, Blanco sought to be granted the acquittal that Federal Judge Luis Rodríguez had issued in 2015 in favor of Muñoz, Pochetti, and former Santa Cruz governor Daniel Peralta. Following criticisms about the potential length of the trial, the tribunal announced it would add a second day of hearings and confirmed that the Muñoz case will begin to be heard in March. In this context, Pochetti testified as a collaborating witness and stated that, following instructions from her defense, she paid a bribe to the judge to close the file, in addition to detailing the money movements made by her husband. Two weeks ago, the Court had already revoked the 2015 acquittals by granting a appeal from the General Prosecutor's Office, considering that they did not cover the crime of money laundering. According to the prosecution, Muñoz and his circle laundered at least 70 million dollars that they took out of the country to invest in 16 luxury properties in Miami, two in New York, and a tourism project on a 16-hectare coastal plot in the Turks and Caicos islands destined for a resort. The revelations of Víctor Manzanares, the Kirchners' accountant and a collaborating witness, expanded the map of hidden assets to include investments of over 100 million dollars in Argentina, with the purchase of more than a hundred properties, including two estancias in Santa Cruz—one of 20,000 hectares—, cabin complexes in Villa La Angostura, El Calafate, and San Martín de los Andes, garage buildings, houses, and apartments in Buenos Aires and Río Gallegos, as well as vehicles, road machinery, and hotels. It is presumed that the funds came from the revenue investigated in the "notebooks of corruption".
